A statutory body in Hong Kong

A statutory body in Hong Kong, tasked with developing education and training systems in line with socio-economic development, was facing budget pressure due to continuously rising subscription fees. Some services were still running on outdated physical servers and VMware infrastructure with limited performance and scalability, creating risks of single points of failure. The coexistence of heterogeneous environments—physical machines and VMware—across multiple campuses led to operational complexity and long resource delivery cycles, making it difficult to quickly respond to smart education requirements. The client urgently needed to build an open, elastic, and sustainably evolvable virtualization foundation to support innovative services such as virtual simulation teaching and digital academic management.

The client adopted ZStack ZSphere to enable VMware-to-ZStack migration. Using the V2V migration tool, they performed live migrations of innovative workloads such as virtual simulation teaching and digital academic management. This allowed different research departments to access resources independently and securely, improving operational efficiency and business stability. By reusing existing servers and centralized storage (FC-SAN), ZStack ZSphere provided unified management across physical servers using centralized storage and VMware environments on a single platform, thus enhancing resource utilization.

Customer Benefits

1.Optimized Resource Utilization

The new platform efficiently leveraged existing hardware and enhanced resource scheduling capabilities; reduced overall IT costs by 37%, with the savings reinvested into building three research laboratories.

2.Simplified Operations & Maintenance

A unified control plane significantly reduced cross-platform management complexity.

3.Faster Resource Delivery

ZStack’s self-service capabilities improved responsiveness to academic and research needs; the time to launch new workloads was cut from 21 days to 7 days.

4.Highly Available Architecture

ZSphere eliminated single points of failure (SPOF) across campuses, ensuring high availability for teaching and research applications; the elastic architecture lays the foundation for a future VR training platform serving tens of thousands of users.