Gartner recently published the Market Guide for Server Virtualization Platforms, analyzing the competitive landscape, technology trends, and recommended vendors in the virtualization market. Following its inclusion in the 2023 and 2024 reports, SmartX has once again been named a representative vendor, leveraging its production-grade virtualization products, continuously evolving technological capabilities, and large-scale deployment cases.
Market Guide Highlight: Accelerate Evaluation of VMware Alternatives and Seize the Opportunity for Change
The Market Guide points out that Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware marks a turning point in the server virtualization market, raising concerns among existing users about increased total cost of ownership (TCO), declining technical support quality, and reduced business value. Many users are taking this opportunity to re-examine their IT architecture design and seek VMware alternatives that offer comparable core capabilities.
Gartner predicts that by 2028, cost issues will drive 70% of enterprise VMware clients to migrate 50% of their virtual workloads.
SmartX Native Virtualization ELF: Production-Grade Stability and Proven Enterprise Scale
As a core component of the SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform, the native virtualization ELF provides enterprise users with various advanced virtualization features comparable to vSphere Enterprise Plus (VEP), meeting the demands of high-performance computing applications and enabling more efficient and simpler virtual machine operation and management.
This consecutive recognition is built on ELF’s foundation of production-ready stability, which has been proven at scale, supporting nearly 700 enterprises and running approximately 100,000 virtual machines on thousands of hyper-converged nodes in production environments.
Read the blog to see a comparison of some key features between ELF and VMware virtualization.
Overall, ELF matches the vast majority of vSphere’s core enterprise features, including VM resource configuration, lifecycle management, virtual machine High Availability (HA), Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS), VM snapshots, and cloning. Furthermore, ELF also provides advanced virtualization features found in vSphere Enterprise Plus (VEP), such as SR-IOV pass-through NICs, distributed switches, GPU pass-through, and vGPU. It also supports specialized technologies like virtualization of domestic cryptographic devices and domestic GPUs, better meeting the usage requirements of users in the Greater China market.
ELF as a vSphere Alternative: Validation and Practice
Currently, numerous leading users in sectors such as finance, healthcare, and manufacturing have adopted ELF to replace vSphere virtualization, supporting core production services and databases, and steadily advancing the process of adopting alternative solutions.
A Large State-owned Bank
Deployed 1,500+ ELF-based cloud nodes across the head office and branches, supporting tens of thousands of virtual machines
This large state-owned bank began surveying VMware alternatives early on, and following extensive testing, fully recognized the functionality and stability of SmartX’s native virtualization. Over the subsequent years, they gradually deployed over 1,500 ELF-based cloud nodes across the headquarters and 30+ branches nationwide, supporting tens of thousands of virtual machines and carrying various production systems, including Class C and D applications, DB2 databases, and Redis caching databases.
A Leading Insurance Group
Migrated 500+ VMware virtual machines using the SMTX Migration Tool, minimizing business impact
This leading insurance institution originally used Nutanix hyper-convergence (integrated with VMware vSphere) to support production business systems. With Nutanix exiting the China market and the deepening of IT infrastructure localization efforts, the user sought a domestic alternative for Nutanix hyper-convergence and an ELF virtualization replacement for vSphere. The SMTX Migration Tool was successfully used to online migrate 200+ production VMs and 300+ test VMs—running key business and office systems—from the VMware platform to the SmartX ELF virtualization platform. The entire migration process was stable and simple to operate.
Beijing Jishuitan Hospital
Hyper-converged appliance based on ELF virtualization supports internet medical services in the DMZ zone, with multiple expansions to support all hospital business systems
The hospital chose a hyper-converged appliance based on SmartX native virtualization ELF to support internet medical services in the DMZ zone, including online diagnosis and treatment, registration, and video consultation. The system was subsequently expanded multiple times to support all hospital business systems, with over 40 nodes currently deployed, supporting HIS, LIS, EMR, and other core systems.
Huashan Hospital Affiliated to Fudan University
Built a cluster using SmartX hyper-converged pure software paired with domestic servers, migrating 40+ production environment virtual machines
The hospital urgently needed a stable, independently controllable alternative to address service risks following the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. They opted for the SmartX hyper-converged pure software architecture (based on ELF virtualization) paired with domestic servers. They have since used the SMTX migration tool to online migrate over 40 production VMware VMs (running Anesthesia Systems, Financial Systems, etc.) to the hyper-converged platform, with the entire process being stable and seamless.
A Leading Domestic Power Lithium Battery Manufacturer
Adopted ELF as the sole virtualization platform for all future new clusters, with 100+ nodes supporting core business systems like MES
Facing issues with low resource utilization, complex maintenance, and limited scalability, the manufacturer chose the ELF platform as the sole virtualization platform for all future new clusters following multi-round testing. They have since deployed over 100 nodes to fully support core business systems at the headquarters and multiple branch factories.
A Global Renowned New Energy Innovative Technology Company
Deployed 100+ ELF nodes across 7 bases/branches, supporting core business systems like MES
The client is gradually replacing over 100 VMware virtualization clusters across 7 bases/branches with SmartX ELF virtualization, carrying business systems including MES, AGV, and Process Management. The solution is cost-effective through a pure software deployment and a perpetual license model for the ELF virtualization and ZBS distributed storage combination.
Discover the VMware alternative solution to learn more about product feature comparisons and user replacement case studies.
