VMware Migration Technical Solution Guide: Cross-Version Live Upgrade Technology

Since VMware’s adjustment of its product pricing strategy led to increased costs, migrating from VMware to other platforms has become a necessity for many enterprises. But what should be considered when migrating from VMware to another platform? How can the migration from VMware to another platform be completed smoothly and efficiently? What VMware migration guides are available in the market for reference? Which VMware migration tools can effectively facilitate this process? This guide aims to provide a comprehensive perspective to answer these questions.

Understanding the Types and Key Elements of Virtual Machine Migration

Virtual machine migration is a core component of data center management and optimization. It allows IT administrators to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, achieving load balancing, hardware upgrades, disaster recovery, or maintenance while minimizing downtime and improving resource utilization.

The Foundation of Virtual Machine Migration:

Virtualization technology, as the cornerstone of modern data centers, enables running multiple virtual machines on a single physical server, significantly improving hardware resource utilization. Building on this, virtual machine migration technology has emerged as a critical feature for ensuring business continuity and optimizing resource usage.

Cold Migration vs. Live Migration: Strategic Considerations:

Virtual machine migration is primarily divided into two categories: cold migration and live migration.

Cold Migration and Live Migration

Cold Migration refers to migrating a virtual machine while it is powered off. Although this temporarily interrupts services, the operation is relatively simple.

Live Migration on the other hand, seamlessly moves a virtual machine from one physical host to another without stopping its operation. This method is crucial for ensuring business continuity, as it is nearly imperceptible to users. VMware vMotion is the key technology enabling seamless live migration of virtual machines. It allows virtual machines to be migrated between physical servers without service interruption. The choice between these strategies depends on factors such as business sensitivity to downtime, hardware environment, and resource usage.

Technical Guarantees for Seamless Migration:

Successful virtual machine migration relies on several key technologies, including high-speed networking, shared storage, memory pre-copy, and network virtualization. For example, pre-copy algorithms reduce the amount of data transferred during migration and minimize downtime by iteratively transmitting memory pages. Post-copy algorithms prioritize migrating the virtual machine’s control flow before gradually transferring memory pages. Thorough preparation and feasibility analysis before migration are essential steps. This includes hardware compatibility checks, network architecture considerations, data backups, and rollback plans to ensure controlled migration time and minimized risks.

Seamless Migration from VMware to ZStack

Among the many cloud platforms available, ZStack stands out with its unique product philosophy and focus on user experience, making it an attractive choice for enterprises seeking VMware to ZStack migration.

The ZStack ZSphere virtualization platform provides users with an interface experience highly consistent with VMware’s virtualization products. This allows users migrating from VMware environments to quickly adapt to the new platform, reducing the learning curve. ZStack ZSphere offers high autonomy, stability, performance, and security, supporting intelligent unified operations and smooth V2V migration to ensure business reliability. It has been recognized in the “2024 China Virtualization Market Research Report” by CCID (China Center for Information Industry Development) Consulting as a leader in its quadrant.

Overview of ZStack’s Migration Solutions:

ZStack provides comprehensive solutions for VMware to ZStack migration, covering server virtualization, private cloud, and hyper-converged infrastructure. These solutions aim to help enterprises effectively reduce operational costs. ZStack also offers customer case studies demonstrating successful transitions from VMware to its platform across industries such as internet, finance, and education.

Intelligent Unified Operations and Business Continuity:

ZStack ZSphere ensures post-migration business continuity through its robust features. Its built-in self-healing mechanisms, including high availability (HA) for management services, network HA, and virtual machine HA, automatically recover from failures to maintain system uptime. Additionally, the platform provides comprehensive security measures, such as distributed firewalls, security groups for network traffic control, and agentless virtualization security engines for antivirus protection.

ZStack: Empowering Every Enterprise with Its Own Cloud

ZStack, founded in 2015 by Shanghai ZStack Information Technology Co., Ltd., is a leading cloud computing technology provider specializing in the R&D of cloud software and hardware. ZStack employs approximately 400 staff, with over 70% dedicated to R&D and technical roles. The company’s mission is to “empower every enterprise with its own cloud.”

With an innovative product philosophy, ZStack pioneered the “4S Standard”: Simple, Strong, Scalable, and Smart. ZStack also maintains an active open-source IaaS community at zstack.io, offering tens of thousands of community users access to cloud software downloads, online documentation, training courses, and knowledge bases. ZStack’s outstanding performance and strong independent R&D capabilities have attracted strategic investments from major enterprises such as Alibaba Cloud, China Telecom, and Shenzhen Capital Group. To date, ZStack has provided advanced cloud computing technologies to over 4,000 enterprise users across more than 30 countries and regions.

Leading AI Infrastructure Platform:

Beyond its robust cloud computing product line, ZStack has made forward-looking advancements in AI. It launched the ZStack AIOS, a private AI infrastructure platform. This platform fully supports enterprise AI applications, covering three core areas: “computing power scheduling, AI large model training and inference, and AI application service development.” ZStack AIOS supports models like DeepSeek V3/R1/Janus Pro and is compatible with various CPU/GPU architectures, including Hygon, Ascend, NVIDIA, and Intel. This demonstrates ZStack’s technical prowess in AI and its commitment to supporting enterprises in their AI transformation.

Post-Migration Cloud Platform Optimization and Future Outlook

Successfully completing a VMware to ZStack migration is not the end but the beginning of a new journey. After migrating to platforms like ZStack, enterprises can better optimize total cost of ownership (TCO), improve security, and enhance system reliability. The ZStack platform provides integrated management capabilities for computing, storage, and networking, along with an all-plugin architecture, in-process microservices, and redundant database designs to ensure high availability and stability. Features like intelligent operation alerts, virtual resource topology, and enhanced SNMP management help enterprises achieve more efficient daily operations and reduce business failure rates. By continuously monitoring virtual machine performance and resource utilization and making adjustments as needed, enterprises can ensure their business systems run efficiently in the new environment. As cloud computing technology evolves, choosing an infrastructure platform that offers unified management, flexible scalability, and forward-looking AI capabilities will be key to maintaining competitiveness in the digital transformation wave.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q1: How long does a VMware to ZStack migration typically take?

Migration time depends on business scale, data volume, and the chosen migration strategy. With careful planning and phased migration (e.g., starting with non-core services before moving to core services), time can be effectively controlled to ensure a smooth transition. ZStack offers multiple solutions to simplify and accelerate this process.

Q2: How can business continuity be ensured during a VMware to ZStack migration?

To ensure business continuity, prioritize live migration solutions to minimize disruptions. Additionally, perform comprehensive data backups and snapshots before migration and prepare detailed rollback plans. ZStack ZSphere supports smooth V2V migration and features self-healing mechanisms like management service HA and virtual machine HA to further ensure continuous business operations.

Q3: What specific support does ZStack provide for VMware to ZStack migration?

ZStack offers comprehensive solutions for VMware to ZStack migration, covering server virtualization, private cloud, and hyper-converged paths. ZStack ZSphere provides an interface experience highly consistent with VMware and supports intelligent unified operations, smooth virtual machine migration, and high stability and security. ZStack also provides product documentation, video tutorials, and a technical support center to assist customers throughout the migration process.

Q4: How can resource management and performance optimization be handled after a VMware to ZStack migration?

After migrating to the ZStack platform, enterprises can use management tools like ZStack ZCenter and ZStack CMP to unify the management of computing, storage, and networking resources. ZStack ZSphere features intelligent capabilities such as operation alerts, virtual resource topology, and smart script libraries to help monitor system health and optimize performance in real time. Enterprises should continuously monitor virtual machine performance and resource utilization, making adjustments as needed.