Since Broadcom acquired VMware, frequent adjustments to VMware’s product portfolio and licensing model have steadily increased both the subscription costs and usage risks for enterprise customers.
As a competitive full-stack alternative to VMware, SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP) offers four solutions that allow enterprises to replace VMware vSphere, vSAN, Tanzu, NSX, and other components at their own pace, achieving cost reduction and efficiency gains.
1. Replace vSphere and Upgrade to a Hyperconvergence Infrastructure
Enterprises using VMware virtualization with centralized storage can achieve a full architecture upgrade by replacing “vSphere+SAN storage” with the HCI-based SmartX ECP Essential. It achieves both domestic virtualization replacement and enhanced performance by delivering a more reliable, flexible, and high-performance distributed storage service.
The SmartX ECP Essential — featuring its native hypervisor ELF and distributed storage ZBS — can fully replace VMware virtualization and centralized storage. The multi-cluster management platform CloudTower serves as a replacement for vCenter.
Key Components
- Native Hypervisor – ELF: Developed and optimized based on KVM, offering comprehensive compute virtualization and full VM lifecycle management capabilities.
- Distributed Storage – ZBS: Independently developed distributed block and file storage services with high performance and reliability.
- Multi-Cluster Management – CloudTower: A unified GUI for managing ECP clusters across multiple data centers, providing full capabilities for cluster management, monitoring, operations, and upgrades.
Advantages
- Architecture Upgrade: Replaces traditional virtualization + centralized storage with a hyperconverged architecture, simplifying infrastructure while improving storage performance, availability, and scalability.
- Domestic Virtualization: ELF, built on KVM, delivers advanced virtualization features equivalent to vSphere Enterprise Plus (VEP), including DRS, SR-IOV, GPU passthrough, and vGPU, etc.
- Free Migration Tool: Offers a free, agentless migration tool — SMTX Migration Tool — to migrate VMware VMs to SmartX ECP smoothly.
2. Replace vSAN While Retaining the vSphere Experience
For organizations using VMware’s previously standalone products of vSphere and vSAN, there are two options:
- Replace the entire stack with the SmartX ECP Essential (as in Solution 1), or
- Keep vSphere while replacing vSAN with SmartX distributed storage, avoiding the cost surging caused by adopting VMware’s new bundles – VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
For the second option, ZBS is deployed in a hyperconverged architecture (SMTX OS) alongside vSphere on the same hardware servers, with the cluster jointly managed by CloudTower and vCenter.
Key Component
- SMTX OS (integrated with vSphere): Supports integrated deployment with vSphere, allowing organizations to retain the complete VMware virtualization ecosystem while gaining the benefits of SmartX distributed storage.
Advantages
- Flexible Replacement: VMware users can replace vSAN while keeping vSphere, avoiding lock-in to new VMware bundles like VVF or VCF simply for vSAN usage.
- Independence and Controllability: Built entirely in-house (not a Ceph derivative), ZBS offers replicas and erasure coding (EC), disk and network health checks, persistent caching, I/O localization, data-at-rest encryption, and storage reclamation — delivering better performance and stability than vSAN.
- Operational Continuity: Manage distributed storage and vSphere clusters using both CloudTower and vCenter, reducing management complexity and enabling a smooth, phased migration.
3. Build VM–Container Converged Infrastructure with SmartX ECP Standard
For organizations using containers, the SmartX ECP offers a VM-Container Converged Infrastructure (VCCI) solution. With SmartX ECP Standard edition, users unlock the SMTX Kubernetes Service (SKS) and achieve the key functionalities provided by VVF — but without its high subscription costs, and with a simpler, more user-friendly management experience.
Key Component
- SMTX Kubernetes Service (SKS): Provides intuitive Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management, along with a more user-friendly GUI, finer-grained multi-tenancy controls, and richer observability features compared to vSphere with Tanzu (recently renamed vSphere Kubernetes Service by Broadcom). SKS clusters can be deployed on both physical and virtual machines. Administrators can centrally manage VM and container workloads as well as their network security policies through a single GUI.
Advantages
- Modular and Flexible: SmartX ECP enables users to flexibly build a scalable enterprise cloud by adding infrastructure components on demand.
- Lower Costs: Avoid the high subscription fees of VVF and save more on the total cost of ownership with flexible hardware options and simplified operations.
- Unified VM–Container Management: Manage VM–container hybrid workloads and their network security policies from a single GUI, delivering a simpler and more efficient experience than VMware.
4. Achieving a Full-Stack VMware Replacement with SmartX ECP Advanced
Similar to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), SmartX ECP Advanced delivers a complete set of cloud infrastructure capabilities, including compute, storage, networking, Kubernetes service, backup and disaster recovery, network security, and management. Unlike VCF, however, it offers greater flexibility—allowing customers to adopt a modular approach and progress their full-stack infrastructure transformation at their own pace, while avoiding the high subscription costs of VMware.
Key Components
- Networking and Security – Everoute – Delivers distributed firewall, load balancing, virtual private cloud (VPC), and container networking capabilities, with full network traffic visibility. It matches most key functionalities of NSX and adds unique advantages such as one-click VM isolation and unified VM-container security management, improving operational efficiency.
- SMTX Backup and Disaster Recovery – Provides native backup and recovery capabilities, along with replication and recovery features comparable to most vSphere Replication + SRM functions. Supports data backup, asynchronous replication, failover, and disaster recovery drills to ensure robust data protection.
Advantages
- Modular and Flexible – Build an agile enterprise cloud platform with infrastructure components selected on demand.
- Full-Stack Support with Lower Costs – Replace the entire VMware stack with a solution better aligned to customer requirements while reducing VCF subscription expenses.
- Unified Platform for Centralized Management – Manage, operate, monitor, and upgrade clusters, visualize network traffic, configure VPCs, and perform ransomware isolation from a single interface—eliminating VMware’s multi-platform complexity.
With its self-developed technology and comprehensive replacement solutions, SmartX has already helped numerous mid-to-large enterprises in finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and other industries successfully achieve large-scale VMware upgrades and replacements. Learn more about customer stories from our previous blogs:
Four Case Studies Disclose How to Replace vSAN and VMware HCI with SmartX HCI
Why Enterprises Choose SmartX ELF Virtualization as a VMware Alternative: Five Customer Stories
From VMware to SmartX ECP: The Cloud Native Journey of Zigong First People’s Hospital
ConnectWave: Boosting O&M Efficiency and Cost-Efficiency of IT Infra with SmartX HCI
Zheshang Securities: An Ex-User of VMware and Nutanix HCI Embraces SmartX HCI
