ZSvirt/zsvirt

  

Open Source Virtualization
Enterprise Ready, Community Driven

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• VMware Migration Guide

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

Powered by the same enterprise engine as ZSphere, ZSvirt inherits proven success across global customers below.

Proxmox VE vs VMware vSphere vs ZSvirt

ZSvirt is governed by a lightweight open-source governance model that defines how the project is maintained, how decisions are made, and how contributors collaborate.

The GOVERNANCE.md document is the starting point for learning about project roles, maintainer responsibilities, decision-making processes, release management, and community collaboration.

As the community grows, the governance model may evolve to include dedicated maintainers, working groups, and more formal project processes.

We welcome and appreciate contributions from the community. Whether you are fixing bugs, improving documentation, proposing features, adding tests, or sharing deployment, migration, and operational practices, your contribution helps make ZSvirt better.

If you are new to the project, you can start with documentation improvements, issue reports, test verification, migration experience, or community discussions. Developers are also welcome to contribute code improvements, tooling enhancements, and integrations.

We may recognize active contributors through community acknowledgements, release notes, contributor lists, or future community programs.

Before contributing, please read:

• CONTRIBUTING.md

The security process for reporting vulnerabilities is described in SECURITY.md.

Please do not report security vulnerabilities through public GitHub Issues or Discussions.

ZSvirt is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.

Some repositories or components may include third-party open-source software under different licenses. Please check the LICENSE, NOTICE, and related files in each repository for details.