Today we are open-sourcing ZSvirt, our enterprise virtualization platform, under the GNU General Public License v3.0.
ZSvirt: enterprise virtualization, now open source and community driven.
Effective immediately, any organization or developer can obtain the complete source code and installation images free of charge from GitHub and zsvirt.io, and run them in production at no license cost. The community edition matches ZStack's commercial edition in supported features and scale, with no restrictions introduced by open-source licensing.
● Repository: https://github.com/zsvirt/zsvirt
● Community site: https://zsvirt.io
Years of production-hardened virtualization, handed to the community
ZSvirt is derived from ZSphere, ZStack's commercial virtualization platform. That engine has been validated across more than 1,000 production deployments spanning financial services, healthcare, education, manufacturing and transportation.
Today we are handing it to the community in full.
For enterprises, this means the technology path at the virtualization layer is theirs to control — the code can be inspected, the capabilities extended, and the direction of the project shaped by the people who run it. The way organizations choose a virtualization platform is changing: Gartner's 2025 Market Guide for Server Virtualization Platforms projects that cost pressures will drive 70% of enterprise VMware customers to migrate half of their virtual workloads by 2028. An open, mature and self-governed virtualization foundation is our answer to that shift.
Migration tooling ships with the release, at no additional charge
When teams consider replacing a virtualization platform, the hardest question is rarely whether the new platform is good. It is how to get there from the old one.
The built-in ZMigrate toolset ships in full with the open-source release. There is no separate charge for migration tooling, and no need to license third-party migration software.
In the current version, online migration is subject to a volume limit that will be progressively lifted in future releases; offline VM import is unrestricted.
Operations do not have to start over
Unlike alternatives that ask teams to adopt an entirely new operating model, ZSvirt preserves the VM-centric workflows administrators already know across clusters, hosts, virtual machines, storage and networking.
After migration, existing operational practices carry forward, without the retraining and process rework a platform change usually demands.
10,000 hosts under one control plane, no need to split by scale
ZSvirt's architecture supports more than 10,000 hosts under a single control plane, with up to 768 vCPUs per virtual machine. Networking includes SR-IOV acceleration, distributed switches and port groups, with support for SR-IOV live migration.
Secure Boot and vTPM protect the boot chain, keys never leave the cluster
Secure Boot establishes a hardware root of trust from VM firmware initialization, protecting the boot chain against tampering. vTPM gives each virtual machine an isolated trusted key space, meeting the TPM requirements of operating systems such as Windows 11, with those keys generated, rotated and held by the platform's built-in Native Key Provider inside the cluster — no external key service required.
Security-group east-west micro segmentation, MFA/2FA and immutable audit logs complete the platform's security and compliance baseline.
2,000+ open APIs that fit into the tooling you already run
ZSvirt exposes more than 2,000 production-ready asynchronous RESTful/OpenAPI endpoints for fine-grained resource control, along with Go, Python and Java SDKs for integration with Kubernetes, PaaS layers or internal platforms. A native Terraform Provider supports infrastructure-as-code workflows.
50 concurrent migrations, cutover in as little as five minutes per VM
ZMigrate offers agentless, agent-based and cold migration modes, running entirely at the virtualization layer. Full-disk block copy with background incremental sync keeps workloads running throughout, and a test-cutover mode lets teams validate application readiness before the real switch. It supports up to 50 concurrent VM migrations with end-to-end visual progress tracking, covers vSphere 5.x–8.x, Hyper-V, KVM and physical-to-virtual (P2V), and cuts over in as little as five minutes per VM.
Where open source ends and commercial begins
ZSvirt is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0, a strong copyleft license under which anyone may freely use, modify and redistribute the source code, provided derivative works remain under the same license — ensuring improvements flow back to the community.
The community edition provides the full core virtualization feature set — compute, storage and network virtualization, HA, DRS, snapshots, backup, the complete API and multi-language SDKs — and can be used in production indefinitely at no cost. ZStack's commercial offering builds on the community edition with enterprise support services and separate enterprise-edition capabilities.
v1.0.0 is available now, with a public roadmap and governance
ZSvirt v1.0.0 is available today. Installation ISOs ship with checksums and cryptographic signatures and are distributed through regional mirrors. Developers can fork the repository and build from source, join the discussion via GitHub Discussions, and contribute through pull requests. The project roadmap, contribution guidelines and governance documents will be maintained publicly.
Over the next six to twelve months, the ZSvirt project will focus on accelerating platform maturity, broadening ecosystem compatibility and improving operational efficiency across diverse infrastructure environments. The ZSvirt engineering team will work alongside users and contributors to keep improving performance, reliability and enterprise readiness.
● Documentation: https://zsvirt.io/docs
● Download center: https://zsvirt.io/download
Fork it, try it, file an issue — and join the ZSvirt community. Let's build this together.