Replacing VMware: Building a New Infrastructure for Core Healthcare Services via SmartX ECP

As a national tertiary public hospital with over 5 million annual outpatient visits and more than 3,300 beds, Huashan hospital operates its information systems under intense service demands. Its legacy IT architecture utilized multiple configurations, including VMware vSphere + vSAN, VMware vSphere + Nutanix, and vSphere + centralized storage, to support critical operations such as core HIS, EMR, and medical imaging platforms. However, with the expansion of healthcare services and the evolution of technical architectures, the existing IT infrastructure faces multiple challenges, including potential supply chain disruptions, complex O&M management, and the requirement for technological transformation.

As Huashan hospital entered the selection phase for infrastructure transition, the Information Department established two primary objectives: business continuity and technical autonomy. It was determined that the next-generation HCI architecture must possess four core capabilities: migration stability, high-performance storage, unified O&M management, and ecosystem compatibility. During the evaluation, the hospital identified that SmartX ECP fully meets these requirements. Specifically, the SMTX Migration Tool enables the seamless migration of VMware virtual machines; the distributed storage delivers a 40% performance increase over the original vSAN; CloudTower facilitates multi-cluster management across different hospital campuses; and regarding ecosystem readiness, SmartX has completed full-stack optimization and certification with specialized chips and operating systems.

During a month of intensive validation, the hospital's Information Department and the SmartX technical team conducted a full-stack Proof of Concept (POC) test, focusing on service carrying capacity, migration efficiency, and O&M management capabilities. Under high-intensity workloads and failure scenarios, SmartX ECP architecture's storage IOPS volatility, latency, and stability during 12-hour full-link pressure tests successfully met all business continuity requirements. Utilizing the SMTX Migration Tool for cross-platform migration of VMware virtual machines, the team leveraged incremental data synchronization to complete the migration of 2TB of data in approximately 15 minutes, while migrating only the effectively written data. Additionally, the CloudTower management platform was used to verify unified management and O&M across multi-site clusters.

In the 2024 pilot phase, the hospital executed a "surgical" replacement of the legacy vSphere clusters at its West Campus. Initially, an SMTX OS cluster operated in a dual-track parallel mode with the VMware environment; subsequently, incremental migration technology was employed to transition services smoothly to the newly established SmartX ECP resource pool. In the 2025 expansion phase, the hospital developed an incremental migration roadmap based on a business continuity tiering model. The plan involves repurposing several vSAN servers through hardware reuse, prioritizing the migration of services hosted on aging x86 equipment, followed by the batch migration of general systems and core systems protected by high-availability architectures.

Huashan hospital categorized its business virtual machines (VMs) based on business continuity tiers, system coupling, and hardware dependencies. These categories include Tier-1 VMs (hosting HIS, EMR), Tier-2 VMs (hosting ESB, integration platforms), and Intranet VMs (hosting payment services, nursing management). In alignment with disaster recovery RTO/RPO standards defined by business departments, the hospital customized differentiated migration windows and validation mechanisms. For critical systems with large data volumes, such as core business systems and PACS, the SMTX Migration Tool was utilized during off-peak hours for initial full migration, followed by multiple incremental migrations to achieve final synchronization and cutover, thereby minimizing downtime. Lower-priority systems, such as training and office applications, were migrated using a batch migration mode.

In this infrastructure transition, Huashan hospital seamlessly integrated its initial specialized clusters with the existing VMware environment to facilitate the migration of critical workloads. This resulted in a 40% performance increase over the legacy vSAN. By leveraging a software-defined architecture, the hospital eliminated vendor lock-in associated with traditional virtualization licensing, reduced software procurement costs, and achieved a 60% hardware reuse rate. From an O&M perspective, the CloudTower management platform provides a unified control plane across compute, storage, and network resources, offering real-time visibility into VM data flow through topological views. Regarding security, the deployment of Everoute distributed firewalls enables micro-segmentation for business VMs within the cluster, providing verifiable technical support for the hospital’s Level 3 Multi-Level Protection Scheme (MLPS) certification.