Gartner® 2025 Representative Vendor Server Virtualization Platforms

Enterprise Virtualization Without the VMware Tax

ZVF delivers the full enterprise hypervisor experience — VM management, high availability live migration, distributed networking, and storage integration — on any standard hardware, with no per-core licensing surprises.

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100%

VMware Alternative Complete Feature Parity

70%

Average TCO Savings after Switching from vSphere to ZSphere

600+

VMware Replacement Projects - 100% Migration Success Rate

3 months

Free Trial · Full Features · Unlimited Servers

VMware Users

We know why you're looking

Perpetual Licenses Eliminated

The pricing model you planned your infrastructure around no longer exists. Subscription-only means unpredictable annual costs with no exit path.

Forced Product Bundling

You're paying for the full stack whether you need it or not. Features you never use are now baked into your mandatory licensing bill.

Regional Support Downsized

Local teams have been cut. Response times have lengthened. When your production environment has a critical issue, you need engineers who answer.

Vendor Lock-In Tightening

Migration tools, APIs, and ecosystem integrations are all proprietary. The longer you wait, the harder it gets to leave on your own terms.

ZVF was built to make this switch feel seamless.

Capability Parity

Everything you rely on in VMware.
Now on your terms.

Side-by-side with VMware vSphere. Every enterprise-grade capability you depend on — and several they don't offer.

CapabilityFeature	IncumbentVMware vSphere	The alternativeZStack ZVF
VM Lifecycle Management	✓	✓
Live Migration	vMotion	✓ Live Migration
High Availability	vSphere HA	✓ Built-in HA
Distributed Resource Scheduling	DRS	✓ Intelligent Scheduling
Storage Integration	vSAN / FC-SAN	✓ HCI / FC-SAN / NVMe-oF
Network Virtualization	NSX	✓ Software SDN + Hardware SDN
Bare Metal Management	Separate tool	✓ Unified with VMs
GPU / DPU / FPGA Passthrough	Limited	✓ Full PCIe passthrough
Commercial Cryptography Compliance	—	✓ Built-in
ARM64 Architecture Support	—	✓ Kunpeng, Phytium
Pricing Model	Per-core bundle	✓ Flexible / Free trial

Advanced Capabilities Beyond vSphere

vTPM 2.0 + Secure Boot

KMS Centralized Key Management

ZMigrate 2.0

Veeam Native Integration

SR-IOV + DPDK Acceleration

Cross-Version Live Upgrade

Technology

Built on six uncompromising principles

Principle 01

High Autonomy

From code to compliance — fully self-developed.

Code-Level: Near 100% self-developed codebase

Engine-Level: 4 CPU architectures (Intel, AMD, Kunpeng, Phytium, Hygon) across 8 platform environments

Product-Level: Built-in commercial cryptography for one-stop compliance

4 architectures · 8 platforms

Principle 02

High Stability

Power failures don't cause data loss. Failures don't cause downtime.

Full plugin architecture with in-process microservices, redundant databases, metadata consistency

100,000+ test cases per release · 1,000 hours automated testing per cycle

4,500 violent power-off stress tests per month

60,000+ hours in enterprise production including financial-grade core transaction systems

60,000+ production hours

Principle 03

High Performance

Numbers that matter when your core systems depend on it.

Compute: 100 VMs in 40 s; 2,000 VMs in 15 min

Storage: <5% overhead on SAN and NVMe-oF; vhost boosts storage by 70%

Network: SR-IOV delivers 60× over Linux Bridge; OVS-DPDK 6×

#1 SPEC Cloud · Kunpeng + Kylin

Principle 04

High Unification

One platform. Every resource type. No tool-switching.

Compute: VMs and bare metal from a single interface

Storage: HCI, FC-SAN, NVMe-oF, local under one policy framework

Network: Soft SDN + Hard SDN in one platform

PCIe: GPUs, DPUs, FPGAs — LLM inference and big data alongside VMs

Compute · Storage · Network · PCIe

Principle 05

High Security

Four layers of protection. None of them optional.

Network: Distributed firewalls for north-south and east-west traffic

Business: Agent-free virtualized antivirus — zero VM performance impact

System: Continuous vulnerability scanning with commercial tools

Data: Commercial cryptography for encryption and identity

Full commercial crypto compliance

Principle 06

High Intelligence

Smart enough to reduce alert fatigue. Powerful enough for complex environments.

Alerts: Fully customizable alarm metrics across any event type

Topology: Visual map of all data center resources and interconnections

SNMP: Proprietary MIB library for comprehensive SNMP management

Scripts: Centralized operational script management at scale

Zero alert fatigue · Full visibility

Migration Path

Make the switch without the stress

Three steps. No scripting. No forced cutover.

Step 01

Run both, side by side

ZVF natively integrates with VMware vCenter. During migration, your KVM and VMware-managed resources are visible and manageable from the same interface. No forced cutover.

Step 02

Migrate workloads through the UI

The entire migration process is UI-driven — no scripting, no CLI expertise required. Supports all mainstream Windows and Linux VM configurations with guaranteed disk order consistency.

Step 03

Decommission on your schedule

Once workloads are validated on ZVF, retire your VMware licenses on your timeline. No artificial deadlines, no migration lock-in.

Deployment Scenarios

Built for every environment

Scenario 01

Core Production Environment

HCI Hyper-Converged Bare Metal Storage-Compute Separation

Scenario 02

Testing & General Business

Dev & Test Hardware Optimization

Maximize the value of existing hardware

Scenario 03

Disaster Recovery

Business Continuity Failover Automation

RPO = 0 · RTO ≈ 3 minutes for critical systems

Scenario 04

Commercial Cryptography Compliance

Data Encryption Integrity Assurance Regulatory Compliance

Customer Stories

Trusted by enterprises worldwide

Organizations across regulated and critical industries rely on ZVF for their core infrastructure.

Customer Stories

"One cloud, unified portal, simplified management, increased efficiency"

Australia 5G Networks

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Customer Stories

"Leveraging its extensive field experience in VMware replacement, robust hardware reuse capabilities, and "worry-free" migration technology, ZStack implemented a solution centered on the ZSphere Virtualization Platform. This initiative successfully helped the university achieve co…"

A Hong Kong private University

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Customer Stories

"A Macau public service organization replaced Hyper-V with ZStack ZSphere, leveraging existing hardware and a seamless three-step migration. This resulted in a 40% reduction in TCO and a 50% increase in operational efficiency, establishing a high-availability, open platform to pow…"

A Macau Public Service Organization

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Your VMware exit
starts here.

Talk to our engineers and discover how ZVF can make your migration painless.

Enterprise Virtualization Without the VMware Tax

We know why you're looking

Everything you rely on in VMware.Now on your terms.

Built on six uncompromising principles

Make the switch without the stress

Built for every environment

Works with the hardware you already own

Trusted by enterprises worldwide

Your VMware exitstarts here.

Everything you rely on in VMware.
Now on your terms.

Your VMware exit
starts here.