VMware-to-ZStack Virtual Machine Migration Test Plan in Multi-Site Disaster Recovery Environments

Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and the subsequent changes to its product sales model, which have significantly increased user costs, a growing number of small and medium-sized enterprises across Asia, Europe, and North America are initiating VMware migration projects. However, when designing migration plans, attention must be paid to multi-site disaster recovery (DR), especially when migrating to enterprise cloud platforms. Implementing a comprehensive virtual machine migration test plan not only validates the resilience of the IT infrastructure but also significantly reduces potential business disruption risks. This process is far more than a simple technical operation; it requires a deep understanding and meticulous planning of data integrity, network compatibility, application performance, and the proficient use of migration tools.

Virtual Machine Migration: Challenges and Core Considerations

Migrating virtual machines from one platform to another, for example, from VMware to ZStack, is a process involving multifaceted complexities. Enterprises planning such migrations often face numerous challenges, such as ensuring data integrity and consistency during the migration, handling complex network configuration compatibility issues, and minimizing business application downtime while avoiding performance degradation post-migration.

To successfully complete a migration from VMware to ZStack and ensure stable and efficient operation of the systems afterwards, understanding how to migrate from VMware to other platforms and knowing the available VMware migration tools becomes crucial. A detailed VMware migration operational guide should cover the entire process from pre-assessment to execution and validation. Typically, virtual machine migration can be categorized into two methods: Online Migration (Hot Migration) and Offline Migration (Cold Migration).

When formulating a virtual machine migration test plan, the following core considerations cannot be ignored:

• Data Integrity and Consistency Verification: This is the cornerstone of a successful migration. Testing should ensure that source data is completely and accurately replicated to the target throughout the migration lifecycle, and that data remains highly consistent upon completion, with no loss or corruption.
• Network Configuration Compatibility Testing: The network configuration of virtual machines is complex and critical. Testing must verify that the migrated VM’s IP address, gateway, DNS, and other network configurations like VLAN, VxLAN, and SDN correctly take effect and seamlessly integrate into the new environment.
• Application Compatibility and Performance Assessment: Migration is not just an infrastructure change; it directly impacts upper-layer business applications. Testing must cover the functionality, stability, and performance of key business applications post-migration to ensure they meet expectations and avoid performance bottlenecks or functional anomalies. ZStack Cloud, in deployments of equivalent scale, achieved high scores in the SPEC Cloud performance test international standard in collaboration with Huawei’s ARM servers, providing a solid foundation for high-performance application operation post-migration.
• Migration Tools and Operational Process Drills: Familiarize yourself with the features, limitations, and best practices of the selected migration tool (such as ZStack Cloud’s migration functionality). Develop detailed operational steps and conduct repeated drills in a non-production environment to ensure the operations team can perform migration tasks proficiently and accurately. ZStack Cloud provides intuitive visual monitoring and management through a unified UI interface, simplifying one-click batch V2V migration operations.

Disaster Recovery Architecture: ZStack Cloud’s Resilience Assurance

In multi-site disaster recovery environments, the resilience of the IT infrastructure is the core guarantee of business continuity. ZStack Cloud, as a next-generation IaaS software, is designed to manage the computing, storage, and network resources of a data center and provides flexible and comprehensive API interfaces. Its comprehensive disaster recovery capabilities are key to building a highly resilient environment.

Firstly, at the storage level, ZStack Cloud supports multiple storage options, including local storage, NAS/SAN storage, and distributed storage like Ceph. This provides diversity and flexibility for data storage in DR environments. Regarding data protection, ZStack Cloud offers comprehensive backup services, including the addition and management of backup tasks, local backup data, and remote backup servers. More importantly, its Continuous Data Protection (CDP) service provides second-level, granular data protection, supporting the restoration of virtual machine data to a specified point in time, greatly enhancing the flexibility and efficiency of data recovery.

Secondly, ZStack Cloud ensures the stable operation of the platform itself and the services it carries through multiple High Availability (HA) mechanisms. This includes management node HA, network HA, virtual machine HA, and virtual machine and service failure detection, enabling automatic fault recovery. This means that even if a component fails, the ZStack Cloud platform can automatically recover, ensuring business continuity. For example, when a host’s service NIC fails, all virtual machines associated with that NIC will be migrated to other hosts to ensure service high availability.

Migration Testing: A Key Link in Ensuring Business Continuity

In multi-site disaster recovery scenarios, virtual machine migration testing is not only a test of the migration technology itself but also a comprehensive verification of the entire DR system’s response capability and recovery efficiency. A complete test plan should include the following key steps:

• DR Rehearsal and Business Takeover Verification: Conduct regular DR rehearsals, simulating sudden failures at the primary site, such as host downtime or network interruption, and then execute the migration of virtual machines to the standby site. During this process, meticulously record and verify the business takeover situation at the standby site, Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), ensuring core businesses can resume operation quickly and smoothly at the standby site.
• Network Isolation and Routing Verification: In the test environment, simulate network isolation at the DR site and verify that the migrated virtual machines can correctly communicate through the DR site’s network services. This includes verifying whether IP address assignment, routing table updates, firewall rules, etc., correctly take effect in the new network environment.
• Platform High Availability Mechanism Verification: Besides testing at the business application level, it is also necessary to verify the high availability mechanisms of the ZStack Cloud platform itself, including management node HA, network HA, virtual machine HA, etc., ensuring the platform itself remains stable and operational during migration or failure recovery, achieving automatic fault healing.
• Monitoring and Alerting System Verification: Throughout the testing process, fully utilize ZStack Cloud’s monitoring and alerting functions, such as ZWatch monitoring, SNS message notification, and Webhook integration, to track virtual machine status, resource performance metrics, and any abnormal events in real-time. This helps in timely problem discovery, rapid fault localization, and resolution, thereby ensuring the effectiveness of the migration test.

Through these meticulous virtual machine migration tests, enterprises can minimize the risk of business interruption, ensure that core businesses can quickly recover and continue running in the event of any disaster, providing a solid guarantee for the enterprise’s digital transformation.

ZStack: Let Every Company Have Its Own Cloud

Founded in 2015, ZStack is committed to becoming a leading provider of fundamental software in the era of intelligent computing, offering a digital and intelligent computing power platform for global enterprises. ZStack’s product matrix comprehensively covers data center cloud infrastructure, including virtualization, cloud platform, container cloud platform, distributed storage, hyper-converged appliances, cloud-native hyper-convergence, multi-cloud management platform, and database cloud platform.

Currently, ZStack serves over 4,000 enterprise users in more than 30 countries and regions worldwide, with over 1,000 cases of VMware-to-ZStack migration and replacement. It can provide VMware-to-ZStack migration paths for enterprise users through virtualization, enterprise cloud, container cloud, and HCI.

In the era of intelligent computing, ZStack launched a new generation AI infrastructure operating system——the ZStack AIOS platform. This platform, with “AI” at its core, facilitates AI innovation and implementation through three layers: computing power, model, and operations. It effectively decouples computing power silos and model silos, significantly optimizes AI application performance, reduces AI application costs, and ultimately enables self-service AI. The ZStack AIOS platform supports GPU partitioning for precise computing power quantization, managing heterogeneous AI computing power down to 1%, greatly reducing computing costs. At the model layer, it provides full lifecycle management from model training, evaluation, inference to update, and significantly enhances model training and inference performance and model service experience through capabilities like intelligent deconstruction of AI tasks, dynamic optimization routing, distributed parallel training and inference, and adaptive load balancing. The operations layer, through a globally感知 self-service platform, provides a visual unified portal, multi-intelligent computing center scheduling, security and privacy保障, elastic cross-domain fault tolerance, multi-tenant metering and billing, and dynamic quota management. Recognized for its卓越 technical capabilities and innovation, ZStack has been listed by Gartner as a representative vendor in China’s AI Infra landscape.

FAQs

Q: What is the most core consideration when conducting virtual machine migration testing in a multi-site disaster recovery environment?

A: The most core consideration in virtual machine migration testing within a multi-site disaster recovery environment is ensuring business continuity and data integrity. This includes verifying zero data loss and consistency during the migration process, and ensuring that business applications can resume operation quickly and stably at the target site, while network configurations can switch over seamlessly.

Q: What are the distinctive features of ZStack Cloud in supporting virtual machine migration?

A: ZStack Cloud provides P2V and V2V migration services and supports agentless replication for VMware-to-ZStack migration, copying virtual machine data from the VMware VADP interface via a transfer machine to achieve non-intrusive migration of existing services. Furthermore, it offers intuitive visual monitoring and management through a unified UI interface, simplifying one-click batch V2V migration operations. ZStack Cloud also possesses strong compatibility and high-performance characteristics, ensuring migrated virtual machines run stably and efficiently.

Q: How to verify if the network of the migrated virtual machine is working properly to ensure the success of the virtual machine migration test?

A: The key to verifying the network of a migrated virtual machine lies in multiple checks. First, confirm that network configurations such as IP address, gateway, and DNS are applied correctly. Second, test network connectivity using tools like ping and traceroute. Finally, conduct end-to-end testing for applications that rely on specific network services to ensure all business flows proceed normally. ZStack Cloud supports various network virtualization technologies, allowing flexible configuration and management of the post-migration network environment, including L2, L3 networks, VLAN, VxLAN, SDN, etc.