ZSvirt Blog | ZSvirt

1 November 2026 VirtWatch Weekly

Virtualization Watch 005: eMudhra Intermediate CA Key Compromise Reaches the Virtualization Stack; VCF Management Plane Hit by Node2Shell

Issue 005: eight eMudhra intermediate CA keys proven recoverable force trust-store updates across XCP-ng, Xen Orchestra and major runtimes; Node2Shell reaches VCF SDDC Manager (VMSA-2026-0008.1, patch pending, CISA KEV); Proxmox 24/7 support takes effect and the Lightbits integration ships; the KVM Forum 2026 schedule is live.

Virtualization Watch Editorial Desk

28 October 2026 Best Practice

ZSvirt FAQ (Part 2): 10 Questions on Migration, Backup, APIs, Community, and Licensing

Part 2 answers 10 questions on migration and backup/recovery, APIs and SDKs, documentation and community, and open-source scope: three VMware migration paths, Veeam plans, Java SDK initialization and HTTP 202, Session and AccessKey authentication, vulnerability reporting, and production use.

ZSvirt Team

27 October 2026 Best Practice

ZSvirt FAQ (Part 1): 10 Questions on Deployment, GPU, Networking, and Storage

The ZSvirt open-source release brought a wave of questions about deployment, GPU and ARM support, and networking and storage. This first part answers 10 of the most common ones, from OVA/qcow2 installs and default credentials to Windows 11 vTPM, GPU passthrough, port groups, and datastores, with links to the official documentation.

ZSvirt Team

18 October 2026 VirtWatch Weekly

Virtualization Watch 004: vSphere Standard Stalls, Talos Hypervisor Debuts

Issue 004: vSphere Standard has no price or GA date after VMware Explore Frankfurt; TalosCon demos Talos Hypervisor alpha; plus QEMU, OpenStack, KubeVirt news.

Virtualization Watch Editorial Desk

9 October 2026 Best Practice

Building a Home Lab with ZSvirt on a Mini PC: What One Node Can Teach You

One Mini PC is enough to learn the full ZSvirt lifecycle: bring up the management node, add a KVM host, attach storage and networking, create a VM, and verify it end to end. This guide covers hardware sizing, the smallest complete lab build, a verification routine, and the point where a single node stops being enough.

ZSvirt Team

9 October 2026 Best Practice

ZSvirt vs Proxmox VE 9: A 2026 Comparison

Proxmox VE became the default free answer to Broadcom's VMware licensing change. ZSvirt, open-sourced under GPL 3.0 on 12 August 2026, is a second free KVM option. Here is how the two compare on operations, scale, scheduling and VMware migration.

ZSvirt Team

28 September 2026 VirtWatch Weekly

VirtWatch Weekly Issue 003: Citrix NetScaler Zero-Days Hit Over a Weekend; Sidero Builds a Hypervisor into Talos Linux

Issue 003: two Citrix NetScaler zero-days hit over a weekend with a 3-day CISA deadline; Sidero builds a KVM hypervisor into Talos Linux while keeping it MPL-2.0; plus Incus 7.5, Harvester 1.9, a QEMU 9pfs guest escape and a Cloudflare cross-tenant data residue incident.

Virtualization Watch Editorial Desk

23 September 2026 Best Practice

ZSvirt in 30 Minutes: From ISO to Your First VM

The shortest end-to-end path to your first ZSvirt VM: install the management node from the ISO, initialize hosts, storage, network, and image storage, create a VM from an ISO or a ready-to-use system image, and verify connectivity — all in about 30 minutes.

ZSvirt Team

18 September 2026 Best Practice

Broadcom Closed VDDK Downloads: The Migration Window Is Closing

Broadcom has confirmed that public VDDK downloads are gone and that the VDDK is not a customer entitlement. If you already have a copy it still works — but rebuilding an environment or starting a new project will hit a wall. Here is what changed, and why the window to migrate is open now.

ZSvirt Team

17 September 2026 Best Practice

10 Reasons You Must Install ZSvirt VMTools

A virtual machine that boots is not yet an operational resource. From guest-level monitoring and quiesced snapshots to network-loss rescue and first-boot automation, here are ten reasons every ZSvirt VM should have VMTools installed.

ZSvirt Team

15 September 2026 Community

ZSvirt Open Source Monthly, Issue #1 — Around the World

Issue #1 of ZSvirt Open Source Monthly: one month after open-sourcing, 1,664 GitHub stars and downloads from 106 countries and regions; OVA and QCOW2 images plus an open-source MCP Server; three Storytellers participants with five more in progress.

ZSvirt Team

14 September 2026 VirtWatch Weekly

VirtWatch Weekly Issue 002: VMware AI Factory Debuts, Proxmox Expands Enterprise Support, Microsoft Patch Tuesday Hits Record 974

Issue 002: VMware Explore 2026 wraps with AI Factory and NVIDIA certification for vSphere 9.1; Proxmox announced 24/7 support and a North America subsidiary in a single week, plus Omnissa Horizon certification; VMSA-2026-0007 exposes a CVSS 9.3 desktop VM escape; Microsoft September Patch Tuesday sets an all-time record with 974 vulnerabilities.

Virtualization Watch Editorial Desk

7 September 2026 Best Practice

Deploy ZSvirt Without Physical Hardware: qcow2 and OVA Images Are Here

ZSvirt download center now offers qcow2 and OVA images: deploy the management node inside a VM on VMware, KVM, VirtualBox, or a cloud host — no physical server needed. This post explains why we added both formats and walks you through downloading, importing, and initializing.

ZSvirt Team

31 August 2026 VirtWatch Weekly

VirtWatch Weekly Issue 001: ZSvirt Core IaaS Engine Goes Open Source, VMware Explore 2026 Kicks Off, Proxmox VE 8 Reaches EOL

Issue 001: ZSvirt open-sources its core IaaS engine under GPL-3.0 and launches the Storytellers YouTube Challenge; VMware Explore 2026 opens today in Las Vegas; Proxmox VE 8 officially reaches end of life; CVE-2026-59310 exploited in the wild across 47 countries; QEMU maintenance releases and Nutanix earnings.

Virtualization Watch Editorial Desk

28 August 2026 Community

Two Weeks After Open-Sourcing ZSvirt, Trial Setup Now Takes Five Minutes

Two weeks after open-sourcing ZSvirt: 1.4k stars, OVA and QCOW2 images in the download center for a five-minute trial with no physical hardware, four technical docs shipped alongside the source, and a user experience program starting on GitHub Discussions.

ZSvirt Team

27 August 2026 Best Practice

Evaluating ZSvirt as a VMware Alternative: A PoC Guide from Deployment to Migration

An executable PoC guide: from defining your evaluation scope and standing up a minimal resource chain, to verifying day-to-day operations, storage and networking, permissions and automation, and finally completing a VMware migration — to help you decide whether ZSvirt fits your environment.

ZSvirt Team

19 August 2026 Best Practice

ZSvirt Migration in Practice: Three Ways to Migrate VMs from VMware

Introduces three ways to migrate VMs with ZSvirt — ZMigrate online migration, OVF import, and VMDK image upload — with a full hands-on walkthrough of ZMigrate from download and deployment through to a successful cutover.

ZSvirt Team

17 August 2026 Tech Sharing

ZSvirt Architecture Explained: How a Production-Proven Virtualization Engine Is Built

A deep dive into ZSvirt's architecture: unified resource abstraction, an async stateless workflow engine, message bus and plugin-based extensibility — and how a production-proven engine is now open source.

ZSvirt Team

13 August 2026 Community

Why We Open-Sourced ZSvirt

Why we open-sourced ZSvirt: our GPL 3.0 license commitment, the community-vs-commercial boundary, and how the project will be run in the open.

ZSvirt Team

12 August 2026 Product News

ZSvirt is Open Source: Enterprise-Grade Virtualization, Now Open to the Community

ZSvirt is now officially open source under GPL 3.0. Full source code on GitHub, ISO images and docs on the community site — enterprise-grade virtualization without vendor lock-in.

ZSvirt Team

11 August 2026 Best Practice

From Zero to Your First VM: A Hands-On ZSvirt Deployment Guide

A hands-on tutorial for administrators new to ZSvirt: install from the ISO, deploy the management node, initialize the datacenter, add hosts/storage/images/networks, and create your first VM.

ZSvirt Team

6 August 2026 Best Practice

VMware Replacement Best Practice at Dayou Futures

Dayou Futures smoothly replaced VMware with ZStack ZSphere, the enterprise edition of ZSvirt, carrying core trading and settlement workloads with a VMware-like experience and high-performance virtualization — eliminating vendor lock-in and significantly reducing IT budget.

ZSvirt Team

26 November 2025 Tech Sharing

Key Insights from Gartner's 2025 Market Guide for Server Virtualization Platforms: Navigating VMware Replacement

Explore key insights from Gartner's 2025 Market Guide for Server Virtualization Platforms, including VMware alternatives, migration strategies, and the evolving virtualization landscape.

ZSvirt Team

16 October 2025 Best Practice

VMware Replacement Best Practice at Nanjing Metro

Nanjing Metro replaced VMware with ZStack ZSphere, the enterprise edition of ZSvirt, carrying Thales train scheduling, signal control, and other core systems via resource pooling and high availability — with 30% higher resource utilization and 99.99% availability.

ZSvirt Team

5 August 2025 Best Practice

VMware Migration Best Practice for an Australian Mobile Carrier

An Australian mobile carrier leveraged ZStack ZSphere, the enterprise edition of ZSvirt, to achieve converged virtualization and cloud management with seamless hybrid-cloud integration, smoothly migrating core workloads.

ZSvirt Team

4 August 2025 Tech Sharing

Zero Downtime: An In-Depth Analysis of Four Core Virtualization Hot Migration Technologies and Best Practices

Explore the four core technologies behind virtualization hot migration: pre-copy memory migration, post-copy memory migration, shared storage migration, and network-assisted migration.

ZSvirt Team

15 July 2025 Tech Sharing

5 Key Considerations for Migrating from VMware to an Alternative Virtualization Platform

Discover five essential considerations for a successful VMware migration, including comprehensive planning, resource optimization, data protection, streamlined migration processes, and post-migration performance optimization.

ZSvirt Team

9 July 2025 Tech Sharing

VMware Migration: Cold Migration vs. Live Migration – Recommended Scenarios, Differences, and Approaches

Compare cold migration vs live migration for VMware VM migration. Understand the differences, advantages, and recommended scenarios for each approach to choose the right migration strategy.

ZSvirt Team

26 June 2025 Tech Sharing

VMware Migration – Server Virtualization Compatibility: Achieving a Smooth Transition and Ecosystem Adaptation

Learn how to smoothly migrate from VMware to ZSvirt with our guide on server virtualization compatibility, hardware and software ecosystem adaptation, and proven migration strategies.

ZSvirt Team

26 June 2025 Tech Sharing

Performance Optimization and Resource Scheduling During VMware-to-ZStack Virtual Machine Migration

Learn how to optimize performance and schedule resources effectively during VMware-to-ZStack virtual machine migration, including pre-migration preparation, data transfer optimization, and post-migration tuning.

ZSvirt Team

29 May 2025 Tech Sharing

ZSvirt Integration and Migration Tools: A Visualized UI Interface for Monitoring and Management, Enabling Non-Intrusive Business Operations

This article introduces ZSvirt's integration and migration services for VMware users, featuring a visualized UI interface for batch V2V migration and agentless migration capabilities, enabling enterprises to achieve a smooth and non-intrusive transition to a cost-effective VMware alternative.

ZSvirt Team

25 March 2025 Tech Sharing

How to Efficiently Share and Optimize GPU Resources for AI Workloads

Explore how enterprises can efficiently share GPU resources through technologies such as vGPU, MPS, MIG, and CUDA Hook. Learn the challenges, trade-offs, and best practices for improving GPU utilization in modern AI infrastructure.

ZSvirt Team

18 March 2025 Best Practice

VMware Replacement Best Practice for a Leading Cross-border Fashion E-commerce Group

A leading cross-border fashion e-commerce group replaced VMware with a lightweight, distributed architecture across dozens of factory parks, reusing existing hardware and unifying management over VPN leased lines.

ZSvirt Team

3 December 2024 Tech Sharing

Improve Efficiency and User Experience: An In-Depth Analysis of ZSvirt Virtualization Platform Shortcut Functions

This article explores the design, implementation, and benefits of the shortcut key system introduced in the ZSvirt virtualization platform. It addresses common user challenges such as long operation paths and low efficiency, detailing how the system assigns shortcuts based on high-frequency scenarios, core functions, and mainstream conventions. The piece covers the technical architecture, including event listeners and command registration, and provides an overview of supported shortcuts for resource lists, task windows, and global search.

ZSvirt Team

4 April 2015 Tech Sharing

ZStack's Scalability Secrets Part 1: Asynchronous Architecture

ZStack offers an architecture where 99% of tasks are executed asynchronously, enabling a single management node to handle hundreds of thousands of physical servers, millions of virtual machines, and tens of thousands of concurrent tasks. This article explores the motivation, design, and implementation of ZStack's asynchronous architecture.

Frank Zhang

4 April 2015 Tech Sharing

The In-Process Microservices Architecture

To tackle challenges such as significant operations overhead, duplication of effort, testability that microservices usually face, ZStack encompasses all services in a single process called management node, building an in-process microservices architecture.

Frank Zhang

4 April 2015 Tech Sharing

ZStack's Scalability Secrets Part 3: Lock-free Architecture

ZStack offers a lock-free architecture built on queues, allowing tasks to control their parallelism level easily from 1 (synchronized) to N (parallel). This article explains how ZStack avoids distributed locks using consistent hashing and memory-based work queues.

Frank Zhang

4 April 2015 Tech Sharing

The Versatile Plugin System

ZStack, with a versatile plugin system, allows features to be implemented as plugins (both in-process or out-of-process) which can not only extend ZStack's functionality, but also hook into business logic to change default behaviours.

Frank Zhang

4 April 2015 Tech Sharing

ZStack's Scalability Secrets Part 2: Stateless Services

Every ZStack service is stateless. Making services highly available and scaled out can be as easy as starting redundant service instances then load balancing them. This article explains how ZStack builds a stateless distributed system using consistent hashing and a centralized message bus.

Frank Zhang

4 April 2015 Tech Sharing

The Tag System

Tags in ZStack not only help users aggregate resources but also control behaviors of the software. ZStack has a complete specification defining category, form, and usage of tags for users, plugins, and third-party software.

Frank Zhang

4 April 2015 Tech Sharing

The Workflow Engine

With a workflow engine, every step in ZStack wrapped in individual flow can be rolled back on error. This article explains ZStack's workflow engine that breaks monolithic business logic into fine-grained, rollbackable steps for system integrity.

Frank Zhang

Virtualization Watch 005: eMudhra Intermediate CA Key Compromise Reaches the Virtualization Stack; VCF Management Plane Hit by Node2Shell

ZSvirt FAQ (Part 2): 10 Questions on Migration, Backup, APIs, Community, and Licensing

ZSvirt FAQ (Part 1): 10 Questions on Deployment, GPU, Networking, and Storage

Virtualization Watch 004: vSphere Standard Stalls, Talos Hypervisor Debuts

Building a Home Lab with ZSvirt on a Mini PC: What One Node Can Teach You

ZSvirt vs Proxmox VE 9: A 2026 Comparison

VirtWatch Weekly Issue 003: Citrix NetScaler Zero-Days Hit Over a Weekend; Sidero Builds a Hypervisor into Talos Linux

ZSvirt in 30 Minutes: From ISO to Your First VM

Broadcom Closed VDDK Downloads: The Migration Window Is Closing

10 Reasons You Must Install ZSvirt VMTools

ZSvirt Open Source Monthly, Issue #1 — Around the World

VirtWatch Weekly Issue 002: VMware AI Factory Debuts, Proxmox Expands Enterprise Support, Microsoft Patch Tuesday Hits Record 974

Deploy ZSvirt Without Physical Hardware: qcow2 and OVA Images Are Here

VirtWatch Weekly Issue 001: ZSvirt Core IaaS Engine Goes Open Source, VMware Explore 2026 Kicks Off, Proxmox VE 8 Reaches EOL

Two Weeks After Open-Sourcing ZSvirt, Trial Setup Now Takes Five Minutes

Evaluating ZSvirt as a VMware Alternative: A PoC Guide from Deployment to Migration

ZSvirt Migration in Practice: Three Ways to Migrate VMs from VMware

ZSvirt Architecture Explained: How a Production-Proven Virtualization Engine Is Built

Why We Open-Sourced ZSvirt

ZSvirt is Open Source: Enterprise-Grade Virtualization, Now Open to the Community

From Zero to Your First VM: A Hands-On ZSvirt Deployment Guide

VMware Replacement Best Practice at Dayou Futures

Key Insights from Gartner's 2025 Market Guide for Server Virtualization Platforms: Navigating VMware Replacement

VMware Replacement Best Practice at Nanjing Metro

VMware Migration Best Practice for an Australian Mobile Carrier

Zero Downtime: An In-Depth Analysis of Four Core Virtualization Hot Migration Technologies and Best Practices

5 Key Considerations for Migrating from VMware to an Alternative Virtualization Platform

VMware Migration: Cold Migration vs. Live Migration – Recommended Scenarios, Differences, and Approaches

VMware Migration – Server Virtualization Compatibility: Achieving a Smooth Transition and Ecosystem Adaptation

Performance Optimization and Resource Scheduling During VMware-to-ZStack Virtual Machine Migration

ZSvirt Integration and Migration Tools: A Visualized UI Interface for Monitoring and Management, Enabling Non-Intrusive Business Operations

How to Efficiently Share and Optimize GPU Resources for AI Workloads

VMware Replacement Best Practice for a Leading Cross-border Fashion E-commerce Group

Improve Efficiency and User Experience: An In-Depth Analysis of ZSvirt Virtualization Platform Shortcut Functions

ZStack's Scalability Secrets Part 1: Asynchronous Architecture

The In-Process Microservices Architecture

ZStack's Scalability Secrets Part 3: Lock-free Architecture

The Versatile Plugin System

ZStack's Scalability Secrets Part 2: Stateless Services

The Tag System

The Workflow Engine

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