9 Universities Replace VMware and Advance ITAI Transformation with SmartX ECP

As VMware shifts to a subscription model and digital campus services place higher demands on IT infrastructure elasticity and security, many universities are reassessing their existing “VMware virtualization + centralized storage” architectures.

To help universities advance information technology application innovation (ITAI) and modernize infrastructure, SmartX ECP provides the full-stack capabilities universities need to build a digital campus, including compute, storage, networking and security, data protection, and management.

Many universities have adopted SmartX ECP to replace VMware, advance their domestic infrastructure transformation, and support critical business systems such as teaching, course registration, and admissions, accelerating campus digital transformation.

Yili Normal University

Yili Normal University has served China’s border region for 77 years and is widely recognized for its contribution to teacher education and talent development in Xinjiang.

The university has used VMware virtualization for nearly 10 years. As more business systems were deployed, the existing virtualization platform and centralized storage could no longer keep pace with growing demand. Continuing to scale the original virtualization environment would have been costly.

Accordingly, the university decided to gradually replace VMware with domestic HCI solutions running on domestic servers, with a strong focus on infrastructure stability and redundancy.

After evaluating multiple options, the university deployed SmartX ECP. In the first phase, it built a small cluster to support the information center’s teaching resources platform and several database workloads, including MySQL and standalone SQL Server instances, to validate SmartX ECP in a domestic server environment.

Following successful validation of the platform’s stability and performance, the university expanded the deployment to support key systems, including the graduate education platform, data platform, examination system, and research systems. The second-phase deployment standardized on SmartX’s native hypervisor, ELF, running on Hygon-based servers. Workloads were organized into multiple clusters based on business requirements and centrally managed through CloudTower.

The two-phase project helped Yili Normal University advance its transition to domestic IT infrastructure. SmartX ECP delivers the performance and stability required for mission-critical database workloads, ensuring high I/O performance under heavy concurrent access. Role-based access control further simplifies administration and operations, improving operational efficiency while reducing costs.

A Leading Science and Engineering University

This university is part of China’s 211 Project and Double First-Class initiative and is home to multiple national key disciplines. Its IT infrastructure was built on a traditional three-tier architecture combining VMware vSphere and EMC storage to support digital campus services. The storage layer lacked high availability, while servers, the virtualization platform, Fibre Channel networking, and storage were operated separately, increasing operational complexity.

Against this backdrop, the university planned to modernize its digital campus infrastructure with a hyperconverged architecture to eliminate storage single points of failure, simplify operations, and reduce its data center footprint. At the same time, it sought to replace VMware virtualization and EMC storage as part of its transition to domestic IT infrastructure. Another key requirement was to avoid hardware vendor lock-in, allowing the university to choose its own hardware and maintain greater flexibility for future expansion.

Following extensive evaluation and testing, the university deployed two SmartX ECP clusters to support more than 130 VMs running digital campus applications. The deployment replaced VMware vSphere with ELF and replaced the existing centralized storage system with SmartX distributed storage, providing high availability for storage services. The university also plans to build additional ECP clusters on domestic servers to further advance its ITAI transition.

University of Nottingham Ningbo China

As China’s first Sino-foreign cooperative university, the University of Nottingham Ningbo China is ranked among the world’s top 1% in ESI rankings across multiple disciplines. Its IT infrastructure has long followed the standards established by the University of Nottingham in the UK, with its core virtualization and storage platform relying on VMware vSAN and other industry-leading technologies.

Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, changes to the licensing model significantly increased software licensing costs. Under the new pricing model, subscription costs for the same deployment more than doubled. To reduce costs and improve efficiency, the university decided to replace VMware vSAN with an alternative infrastructure solution.

During its evaluation, the university found that SmartX ECP supports software-only deployment, allowing existing hardware to be retained; supports VMware virtualization, enabling a smoother and phased transition from VMware; and has been widely deployed in production environments across the financial services and education sectors, demonstrating its stability and performance.

The university ultimately deployed SmartX ECP integrated with VMware virtualization to support its OA systems. This allowed administrators to continue using the familiar virtualization platform while replacing vSAN and reducing overall subscription costs.

A Top University in Hong Kong

A top university in Hong Kong previously used a traditional architecture combining VMware virtualization and centralized storage. As VMware transitioned to a subscription model, procurement costs increased significantly.

As part of its digital campus transformation efforts, the university planned to fully replace its VMware environment. The replacement solution needed to provide reliable and stable performance, support both existing services and new digital campus services, and enable the smooth migration of core production systems such as academic administration systems and domain controller servers.

Following technical evaluation, the university adopted SmartX ECP to replace VMware and used the free SMTX Migration Tool to smoothly migrate more than 100 business VMs to the ECP platform, minimizing business disruption. It also adopted Everoute (SmartX ECP’s software-defined networking and security component) to enhance VM network security.

Since go-live, the ECP platform has remained stable, reducing operational complexity, while SmartX’s professional and responsive technical support has also been recognized by the university.

Suzhou Institute of Technology

Suzhou Institute of Technology, formerly Changshu Institute of Technology, is a provincial public full-time undergraduate institution jointly supported by Jiangsu Province and Suzhou Municipality. It is also a pilot university for the Ministry of Education’s Excellent Engineer Education and Training Program. To respond to national requirements for ITAI, the university planned to upgrade its IT infrastructure with domestic alternatives.

After evaluating multiple options, the university introduced SmartX ECP and built a cluster on Hygon CPU-based servers. The cluster supports core business systems including a smart classroom interaction system, campus cloud drive, water and electricity management platform, teaching assignment review system, and low-carbon energy monitoring platform. These business systems were smoothly migrated from KVM and VMware virtualization to the SmartX ECP cluster.

The university also introduced Everoute’s Distributed Firewall to provide fine-grained isolation for east-west traffic between VMs, improve platform security, and build a virtualization environment that meets classified cybersecurity compliance requirements.

Its pure software architecture also supports minute-level expansion, accelerating the rollout of smart education services. The entire system has been running stably for nearly three years and now supports teaching, management, and research scenarios across the university.

Guizhou University of Finance and Economics

As the top finance and economics university in Guizhou, Guizhou University of Finance and Economics originally used VMware virtualization for its IT infrastructure. Due to changes in the vendor for its new academic administration system and the impact of ITAI policies, the university planned to introduce a domestic virtualization platform for the new academic administration system, while expecting performance, stability, and user experience comparable to VMware vSphere.

After evaluating in-house R&D capabilities, product performance, and POC test results, the university found that SmartX ECP provided the experience most similar to VMware vSphere. It also offered comprehensive VM high availability (HA) capabilities and dynamic scaling with support for different server and component models. The university ultimately selected SmartX ECP to support its new academic administration system.

The university has built an ITAI HCI cluster based on SMTX OS and domestic servers, migrating workloads from the original VMware cluster to SmartX ECP. This makes Guizhou University of Finance and Economics one of the first institutions in Guizhou’s education sector to embark on its ITAI transition journey. The cluster now supports all the teaching systems at the university, including the academic administration system, course registration system, lab system, and teaching quality monitoring and evaluation system.

SmartX ECP’s broad hardware compatibility also gives the university greater flexibility in hardware selection. Compared with the previous traditional architecture, the hyperconverged cluster delivers higher resource density, better performance, and lower latency, meeting the workload requirements of the ISV’s containerized teaching systems.

A Polytechnic Higher Vocational College

As a leading higher vocational college with a strong focus on skills-based education, the college is committed to building first-class program clusters and has developed multiple national-level backbone majors as well as provincial-level branded and high-level program clusters.

As the college continued to grow, its smart campus platform placed higher requirements on the underlying infrastructure. The existing traditional three-tier architecture required significant investment in a new data center and suffered from low resource utilization and complex operations, hindering smart campus development. Against this backdrop, the college planned to build a cloud-based infrastructure and get prepared for the future ITAI transformation.

After a technical evaluation, the college introduced SmartX ECP to support its smart campus systems. This eliminated the need for independent storage and enabled unified management of compute and storage resources. The college could also choose its own server hardware, effectively lowering initial investment. The hyperconverged architecture supports on-demand investment and online expansion, fully meeting the platform’s need for dynamic capacity expansion as services grow.

At the same time, the college used ELF virtualization, aligned with domestic technology standards, to fully replace VMware virtualization, reducing licensing costs and completing a domestic technology stack transition across the infrastructure management platform, server virtualization, and storage.

With its innovative architecture and wide compatibility with domestic technology stacks, SmartX ECP provided the college with an efficient, flexible infrastructure upgrade path aligned with its transition requirements. The college completed its move from a traditional architecture to a cloud-based architecture while reserving room for future growth.

Based on existing hyperconverged capabilities, the college plans to introduce SMTX Backup and DR to build a cross-campus disaster recovery solution, increasing business system availability.

Dezhou Vocational and Technical College

Dezhou Vocational and Technical College is a distinguished institution in Shandong Province for skills-based talent development and a high-quality higher vocational college in the province.

The college originally used a traditional three-tier IT infrastructure based on VMware virtualization. As the infrastructure resources gradually used up and the devices aged, its business services and data faced growing risks. The college therefore sought to modernize its IT infrastructure to enable more flexible operations, reduce management complexity, and achieve local high availability.

Against this backdrop, the college introduced SmartX ECP as part of its infrastructure transformation. The platform supports multiple business systems, including the campus card system, academic administration systems, office systems, and their associated databases. It also adopted SmartX’s native hypervisor, ELF, to replace VMware virtualization, reducing virtualization licensing costs.

The ECP cluster has now been running stably for nine years. With high availability for VMs and storage replicas, the hyperconverged architecture ensures local high availability for business systems and data while reducing operational complexity.

Changshu Vocational Education Center

Changshu Vocational Education Center is located in the Southeast Economic Development Zone of Changshu and is a national key vocational school. To advance self-controlled IT infrastructure development and address the high licensing costs and limited scalability of its traditional VMware virtualization architecture, the school decided to adopt a domestic hyperconverged solution to build a next-generation IT infrastructure.

The school ultimately built a cluster based on SmartX ECP and domestic servers to support core production services including the HR management system, admissions service platform, and campus card system. Using the SMTX Migration Tool, the business systems were smoothly migrated to the ECP cluster, ensuring a smooth cutover and transition for the admissions and campus card systems without requiring application modifications.

Since going live six months ago, the ECP cluster has remained stable, even during the peak admissions season. Failures can be recovered within minutes, effectively ensuring business continuity.

Compared with the previous architecture, ELF simplifies operations and improves resource delivery efficiency by 70%, while software-only deployment reduced initial investment by 50%. Broad compatibility with domestic hardware also gives the school greater flexibility, avoids technology lock-in, and reduces hidden costs.