A Cambodian Bank

As a major local financial institution, this Cambodian bank’s IT systems support a variety of critical financial services, with nearly one hundred virtual machines in operation. The systems place extremely high demands on stability, data security, and business continuity.With business expansion and the rapid increase of internet and mobile banking users, financial services have shifted more quickly online. The bank’s existing multiple VMware virtualization platforms—running different versions—began to expose issues such as complex management, high costs, and limited scalability.Its core needs focused on achieving a VMware alternative, building a highly available architecture, improving resource management efficiency, optimizing the IT cost structure, while also meeting data security and compliance requirements and supporting rapid business growth in the future.

Leveraging its VMware-to-ZStack solution and strengths—“100% replacement of core scenarios, 50% reduction in TCO, and worry-free migration”—ZStack won the customer’s trust. The bank ultimately chose the ZStack Cloud platform to implement VMware-to-ZStack and build a highly available financial cloud infrastructure.

Solution Design: Building a Cloud Infrastructure for Critical Workloads

Production and Test Cluster Design:Using a ZStack Cloud + FC SAN storage architecture, the bank deployed physically independent server clusters for production and test environments, achieving full physical isolation.

Network Strategy Design:The solution divides the environments into completely isolated networks and deploys strict access control policies, ensuring the security and independence of both environments and preventing mutual interference.

High Availability Design:ZStack Cloud’s unique multi-management-node HA eliminates management single points of failure. VM HA ensures services are automatically recovered in case of failures. At the same time, storage multipathing guarantees continuous and reliable data access. Together, this delivers end-to-end high availability from infrastructure to application layer, ensuring stable operation of financial core services and meeting stringent continuity requirements.

Solution Highlights: Flexible Licensing and Easy Scale-Out to Thousands of Nodes

High-Elasticity Deployment:A single ZStack Cloud cluster can flexibly scale from 1 to 1,000 servers, matching the bank’s gradual business growth. It allows step-by-step expansion in line with business needs, optimizing return on investment.

Unified Management Across Versions:ZStack Cloud provides a unified management platform capable of managing the customer’s existing multiple VMware platforms running different versions. Combined with monitoring, alerting, and performance analytics, it helps the O&M team shift from passive to proactive operations, significantly improving efficiency.

Flexible Licensing Models:Licensing can be based on CPU core count, on a per-physical-server basis, or via subscription, depending on customer needs. This flexibility offers the Cambodian bank greater convenience and cost control.

Financial-Grade Disaster Recovery:The disaster recovery solution built on ZStack Cloud provides financial-grade data protection for the bank’s core services, meeting strict business continuity requirements.

Hardware Reuse for Additional Savings:ZStack Cloud supports reuse of the bank’s existing servers and SAN storage devices, avoiding duplicate investment. Meanwhile, resource optimization technologies such as memory overcommit and thin-provisioned storage further improve hardware utilization and reduce costs.

Implementation: “Five-Step Migration” for Worry-Free Transition

Given the complexity of nearly one hundred virtual machines and multiple VMware versions, ZStack provided a complete “Five-Step Migration” methodology, covering the full lifecycle from initial preparation to post-migration operations, ensuring a controllable and traceable migration process with “worry-free migration.”

Assessment and Planning Phase:Comprehensively collect data on VMware environment hardware configurations, resource utilization, and business dependencies; classify core and non-core services; and develop targeted risk mitigation plans.

Pilot Migration Phase:Select non-core systems for initial migration to validate the feasibility of the tools and plan. Based on pilot results, refine the migration process to ensure that subsequent migrations are stable and controllable.

Batch Migration Phase:Use ZStack’s live migration and agentless migration technologies to migrate core business VMs without interrupting services, ensuring normal business operations during migration while guaranteeing data integrity and consistency.

Customer Benefits: Technology Upgrade Drives Quality and Efficiency in Financial Services

Significant Cost Reduction:Through hardware reuse, resource overcommitment, and flexible licensing, the overall TCO after VMware-to-ZStack dropped by more than 40%.

Improved O&M Efficiency:The unified management platform reduces the need for operators to switch between multiple systems. Combined with proactive monitoring and analytics, it lowers O&M complexity and improves response speed and issue resolution efficiency.

Enhanced Business Continuity:End-to-end HA architecture and live migration ensure that maintenance, resource optimization, or physical host failures do not interrupt services. The solution provides financial-grade RPO/RTO, meeting the financial industry’s stringent stability requirements.

Stronger Scalability:The highly elastic deployment architecture supports on-demand capacity expansion, providing a solid IT infrastructure foundation for future online service growth and expansion of the bank’s service coverage.