Try it now — no physical hardware needed. Grab the qcow2 or OVA image, boot it as a VM on VMware, VirtualBox, KVM, or a cloud host (nested virtualization), set an IP, and the ZSvirt management node is ready. See Run ZSvirt inside a VM or jump to the Quick Start.
What is ZSvirt
ZSvirt brings ZStack's enterprise-proven ZSphere virtualization engine into the open-source world. Backed by ZStack, a mature infrastructure leader, ZSvirt is a lightweight, scalable platform for running and managing virtual machines without vendor lock-in.
Install a management node, attach KVM-based hosts, and manage your whole environment — VMs, clusters, storage, and networks — through a web UI, a RESTful API (with Terraform and Go/Python/Java SDKs), or a CLI. VMware migration tooling — online migration, OVF import, and VMDK upload — is built in.
🗣️ Pronunciation Guide
We have heard "ZSvirt" said a few different ways in the community, and there
is no wrong one. Our suggestion: blend the Z and the S into a single
sound, so the name comes out as "Z-s Virt" — close to "zeese Virt".
That is also where the name's playful spirit lives: read as one sound, it says
"This is Virtualization", which is the core idea behind the project. If you
prefer to read it letter by letter as "Z-S-virt," that works just as well.
Say it however comes most naturally to you.
Product Tour
Live Demo
ZSvirt Live Demo is a free hosted environment for trying ZSvirt online — no installation or sign-up required. Open the link and click Demo Login to start exploring the platform right away.
Architecture
ZSvirt uses a modular architecture built around virtualization resource
management, the management plane, extension services, and operational tooling.
Core capabilities include:
- Compute virtualization: host, cluster, virtual machine, image, and
lifecycle management.
- Network virtualization: virtual networks, network services, security
groups, and related capabilities.
- Storage virtualization: primary storage, backup storage, volumes,
snapshots, and storage resource management.
- Management plane: API framework, permission model, events, alarms,
auditing, and system operations.
- Extension services: capabilities for migration, disaster recovery,
monitoring, quota management, access control, and enterprise operations.
- Tools and integrations: installation tools, diagnostics tools, migration
tools, automation scripts, agents, CLI, and external system integrations.
At the software architecture level, ZSvirt emphasizes asynchrony, statelessness,
extensibility, and automation:
- Asynchronous architecture: supports asynchronous messages, asynchronous
methods, and asynchronous HTTP calls to reduce blocking and improve system
throughput.
- Stateless services: individual requests do not depend on state from other
requests, making services easier to scale, recover, and operate.
- Plugin-based extensibility: supports horizontal extension of resource
types, business capabilities, and integration capabilities through plugins.
- Workflow engine: manages the execution order of complex operations and
supports rollback and recovery in failure scenarios.
- Tagging and query capabilities: supports resource attribute extension,
resource classification, unified queries, and automation orchestration.
- Automated deployment: uses automation tools to handle deployment,
configuration, and operations tasks, reducing deployment and maintenance
complexity.
VMware Migration Guide
As enterprises reassess their virtualization strategies, migration from VMware to alternative platforms has become an important topic for organizations seeking cost control, infrastructure flexibility, and long-term operational stability.
ZSvirt provides migration-oriented capabilities and operational tools to help users evaluate, plan, and move workloads from existing VMware environments to ZSvirt-based virtualization infrastructure.
Quick Start
The fastest way to evaluate ZSvirt is to follow the quick start guide in the product documentation. It walks you through preparing compute, network, and storage resources, initializing the management service, and creating your first virtual machine.
Prefer to try it in a VM first? Download the qcow2 or OVA image and run the management node inside any hypervisor — see Running ZSvirt inside a VM.
🚀 Quick Start
▶️ Video
Best Practices
Powered by the same enterprise engine as ZSphere, ZSvirt inherits proven success across global customers below.
Virtualization Platform Comparison
Proxmox VE vs VMware vSphere vs ZSvirt
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
