VMware Migration and Private Cloud Roadmap for a Materials Leader

As the cloud computing ecosystem evolves, structural changes in VMware licensing have significantly impacted IT cost control and architectural scalability. Driven by cost-benefit analysis and the need for technological evolution, Red Avenue sought to adopt independent, high-performance HCI solutions to achieve seamless infrastructure replacement and stack migration. This transition also served as an opportunity to streamline business processes and optimize underlying architectures for core business scenarios.

After in-depth research, Red Avenue identified that SmartX ECP offers native ELF virtualization and self-developed distributed storage to achieve a seamless VMware HCI transition. Furthermore, it meets enterprise requirements for platform reliability, architectural flexibility, and simplified workload migration, leading to its selection for the infrastructure modernization project.

Following rigorous testing and validation, Red Avenue deployed its first SmartX ECP clusters at the Zhangjiagang plant, establishing a distributed, elastic cloud platform to support core operations such as production data processing and equipment monitoring systems. As a key production hub generating massive daily volumes of industrial data, this deployment leverages HCI to pool storage and computing resources. While meeting real-time responsiveness requirements, the solution significantly reduced hardware investment compared to traditional VMware virtualization and centralized storage, providing a scalable blueprint for group-wide IT infrastructure upgrades.

The Zhangjiagang plant’s SmartX ECP cluster underwent nearly a year of rigorous stress testing and validation across various business scenarios, successfully hosting all core systems, including ERP and MES. This transition ensured stable operations while improving resource scheduling efficiency by 40%. Building on this proven experience, Red Avenue rapidly deployed SmartX ECP at its Jinshan plant to replace the previous VMware architecture for core production systems. Through a unified management platform, the IT team achieved centralized visualization and O&M for clusters across both sites. Real-time monitoring of resource utilization, fault alerts, and performance trends has reduced cross-regional response times from hours to minutes.

In practice, Red Avenue utilized the native SMTX migration tool to transition virtual machines from the VMware virtualization platform to the SmartX ECP cluster (based on ELF). With this experience, Red Avenue has summarized key insights covering tool selection, strategic planning, and best practices for pre- and post-migration phases to serve as a reference for other enterprises.