In today’s dynamic IT landscape, enterprises are constantly seeking solutions that deliver superior performance, streamlined operations, and measurable cost savings, particularly as they navigate their future VMware strategies.

As a full-stack modern enterprise cloud infrastructure, Arcfra Enterprise Cloud Platform (AECP) is becoming a popular choice for enterprises across various industries — FSI, manufacturing, hospitality, e-commerce, etc. — to transition away from existing VMware environments and elevate to a future-ready, resilient, and cost-effective cloud infrastructure.

In this blog, we provide seven enterprise case studies, disclosing how they have successfully deployed AECP to replace legacy VMware infrastructure and address their unique infrastructure needs.

Learn more about AECP as a VMware Alternative

A Large National Bank: Deploying Over 1,500 AECP Nodes Across HQ and Branches DCs to Support 10,000+ VMs

After being hindered by the performance bottleneck and limited scalability of the “VMware virtualization+SAN storage” architecture for a long period, the bank conducted evaluations of various mainstream hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions. During the comparative testing between AECP clusters integrated with Arcfra Virtualization Engine (AVE) and VMware virtualization, the bank highly appreciated the functionality and stability of AVE.

Initially, the bank deployed over 60 AECP nodes (integrated with AVE) in the production environment of its headquarters data center. These nodes have been used to support general application systems, DB2 databases, Redis cache databases, and several other production systems.

Afterwards, the bank continued to explore AECP’s application scenarios, deploying AECP clusters for running business services, DR, and DevTest. Moreover, the bank rapidly replicated its AECP deployment model across nearly 40 branches nationwide. To date, the bank has deployed over 1,500 AECP nodes in its data centers of headquarters and branches, supporting the operation of more than 10,000 VMs. All AECP clusters are integrated with AVE, significantly reducing operational complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO).

For large-scale cluster management, the bank utilizes Arcfra Operation Center (AOC) to centrally manage all AECP clusters across headquarters and branches. AOC offers centralized monitoring and a global view of the infrastructure status, enabling administrators at headquarters to comprehensively track resource usage, performance metrics, and the health status of all clusters. This tool has greatly improved the engineer’s operational efficiency and response speed in the bank.

A Top Insurance Company: Replacing VMware Virtualization in a Flexible Approach

A top insurance company initially relied on VMware virtualization and centralized storage to run its business services in the production environment. To enhance IT infrastructure performance and agility, the company opted to transition to a hyper-converged architecture.

During the selection of the virtualization platform, the company was concerned about VMware’s constant changes, and also worried about whether alternative platforms could meet the demands of financial business services in a production environment. With these considerations in mind, the insurance company aimed for an IT infrastructure solution that could support both VMware virtualization and an alternative platform, allowing for smooth migration and a gradual transition away from VMware.

Initially, the company deployed several nodes of AECP clusters (based on AVE) in its DevTest environments. Afterwards, the reliability and stability of AVE were thoroughly validated, along with the feasibility of smoothly migrating VMs from VMware to AVE. Next, the company systematically migrated VMware VMs hosting business services, including group insurance sales management systems, personal insurance core systems, group insurance core systems, group insurance rules engine, and corresponding MySQL databases, to AECP clusters (integrated with AVE).

Furthermore, the company has utilized the AECP cluster converged with VMware virtualization to support Oracle databases. Both virtualization platforms can be centrally managed, providing users with a flexible option for VMware replacement.

An Automobile Finance Company: Prioritizing AECP over VMware vSAN and Centralized Storage, Accelerating BI Batch Processing

An automobile finance company recently completed a successful transition from traditional architecture to AECP for its business intelligence (BI) and data warehouse (DW) workloads.

The institution originally relied on an x86 server coupled with EMC PowerMax all-flash centralized storage to support its Oracle DW system. However, the infrastructure faced serious limitations after years in production: storage capacity was running low, NVMe performance could not be fully leveraged due to the 8GB FC switch, and concerns were mounting around scalability, performance, and long-term sustainability.

To evaluate alternatives, the institution conducted a round of full-scale batch testing using VMware vSAN. During testing, vSAN encountered write cache breakdown just 10 minutes into the batch job. As a result, performance degraded severely. Even with throttled I/O (30MB/s) and reduced data volumes (⅓ of full load), vSAN still failed to meet the production time window of 8.5 hours.

Following this, the institution shifted its focus to AECP, aiming to evaluate whether the platform could deliver better performance and operational stability under full production workloads.

Over three rounds of testing on different storage configurations, AECP demonstrated superior performance and reliability: deployed on full-flash Samsung PM893 SSDs (non-tiered), AECP completed the batch in under 5 hours — a 42% reduction in processing time compared to the original production setup. Latency metrics were consistently low, and throughput peaked at 1.9 GBps, while storage utilization reached 83% without impacting performance.

Today, the institution has fully adopted AECP as the foundation of its next-generation BI/DW infrastructure, deploying a 9+9 node active-active all-flash AECP cluster as its production database resource pool. This cluster now runs Oracle RAC for BI, retail inventory, ESP, image systems, and supports SQL Server Always-On clusters, along with multiple production Oracle and MySQL databases.

Foxconn: Leverages AECP to Replace VMware and Integrate Production Lines on Edge Sites

Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturing services (EMS) provider, initiated a plan years ago to replace traditional VMware virtualization infrastructure with a private cloud, supporting IT systems across its global branch companies.

To stabilize the production line and simplify the O&M, Foxconn replaced VMware with AECP to consolidate the IT infrastructure of its branch factories across Mainland China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and North America. At each edge site, the user deployed AECP clusters to support both DMZ and intranet production systems, including MES, ERP, and production line management systems, as well as development and testing (DevTest) environments and VDI workloads.

In Foxconn‘s DevTest environment, Arcfra Kubernetes Engine (AKE) is used to support GPU-based workloads, enabling unified management of VMs and containers while improving service quality and efficiency. Additionally, Arcfra Network Service (ANS) has been deployed at multiple branch factories to provide microsegmentation-based network security for the DMZ environment.

In addition, Foxconn has also built Active-Active stretched clusters across multiple branch factories, providing high availability protection for critical systems such as the MES system, its associated Oracle RAC databases, the SFC (Shop Floor Control) system, and the Production Line Management System.

Learn more about Foxconn’s practices in our previous blog: Introducing Arcfra Edge Cloud Solution, Providing IT Infra with Enhanced Capabilities and Unified Management

ConnectWave: Replacing VMware and Physical Servers to Modernize E-Commerce Infrastructure with Arcfra

ConnectWave is a leading e-commerce solutions provider in South Korea. Following a company merger, ConnectWave inherited a fragmented IT environment based on physical servers and legacy ESXi-based architecture. Managing these systems across two IDCs posed significant operational challenges, especially with a limited O&M team. Additionally, the rising demands of its AI initiative — PLAi — required a modern infrastructure capable of high-performance computing and seamless scalability.

To address these issues, ConnectWave introduced AECP to its production environment and used Arcfra Migration Tools to migrate 400+ VMs from VMware virtualization to AECP clusters, supporting core e-commerce workloads such as order, payment, inventory, and delivery systems. ConnectWave also leveraged AECP’s AKE module to manage Kubernetes clusters and provide high-performance support to PLAi.

Since the adoption of AECP, ConnectWave has achieved:

• Over 50% reduction in physical rack space, lowering data center rental and energy costs.
• Approximately 15% reduction in IDC operational costs.
• Simplified IT operations, allowing the small O&M team to manage infrastructure via AOC centrally.
• Increased performance and reliability across production workloads.
• Readiness for container workloads, with built-in Kubernetes support (AKE) for AI model training and deployment.

Learn more about ConnectWave’s practices in our previous blog: Customer Interview: How ConnectWave is Advancing E-Commerce with AI and Hyperconverged Infrastructure.

A Century-Old Korean Hotel: Replacing Legacy VMware Environment with AECP for Higher Performance, Simplicity, and Scalability

A century-old hotel owned by a leading Korean group recently completed a successful IT infrastructure upgrade, replacing its legacy VMware virtualization with the AECP.

Initially, the group operated a virtualized environment based on six servers and three SAN storage arrays. However, the system struggled with performance bottlenecks, rising operational costs, and increasing complexity as VM workloads continued to grow. Maintaining separate compute and storage systems led to slow issue resolution, limited scalability, and an inability to meet evolving service expectations.

To address these challenges, the group first deployed AECP in a hybrid approach, retaining VMware as the hypervisor while consolidating the original six servers and three SAN devices into a single three-node AECP cluster. Powered by a hybrid storage architecture of enterprise SSDs and 10K SAS HDDs, the cluster delivered significant performance gains. The initial deployment — including installation and configuration — was completed in just four hours.

Encouraged by the streamlined operations and enhanced performance, the organization later expanded its AECP deployment with three additional nodes. At this stage, it fully transitioned from VMware virtualization to the Arcfra Virtualization Engine (AVE), completing its migration using the Arcfra Migration Tool.

Today, the group benefits from:

• Significantly improved VM performance and system responsiveness
• High availability across the entire cluster
• Reduced hardware footprint by consolidating compute and storage
• Simplified O&M with a single-pane management interface and no need for separate SAN tools
• Future-ready scalability with flexible node expansion and native support for cloud-native workloads

A Leading Consumer Goods Manufacturer in Korea: Modernizing Infrastructure and Reducing Costs with AECP

A leading Korean manufacturer in the consumer goods industry has successfully modernized its IT infrastructure by replacing its legacy VMware-based environment with AECP. Faced with rising costs and performance limitations, the company sought to streamline its operations while maintaining high availability for its essential business systems.

The original infrastructure consisted of just two servers and two SAN storage arrays — an architecture that struggled to deliver the performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency required for modern enterprise workloads. As the number and demands of VMs increased, the company encountered frequent performance bottlenecks. Additionally, managing multiple physical systems increased operational complexity and delayed troubleshooting during incidents.

To address these challenges, the company adopted AECP, deploying a streamlined, software-defined infrastructure built on enterprise-class SSDs and 10GbE networking. The solution enabled the company to:

• Consolidate compute and storage, eliminating the need for SAN management
• Migrate existing VMware workloads seamlessly while reducing software licensing costs
• Achieve high availability with a significantly simplified architecture
• Improve VM performance and responsiveness
• Support future scalability without the high cost and complexity of traditional SAN expansion

AECP’s unified management capabilities allowed the company to operate and maintain its environment with its existing IT staff, without requiring additional storage specialists. The migration to AECP not only enhanced performance and reliability but also delivered significant savings on virtualization licensing and maintenance costs.

Learn more about the features and benefits of AECP as a VMware alternative from our website and previous blogs:

Arcfra Kubernetes Engine vs. vSphere with Tanzu: A Feature-by-Feature Comparison

Arcfra Network Service vs. VMware NSX: Comparable Capabilities, Streamlined Management

Arcfra AECP vs Oracle VirtualBox: VMware Alternatives Compared

Arcfra AECP vs Proxmox VE: VMware Alternatives Compared

Arcfra AECP vs Red Hat OpenShift: VMware Alternatives Compared

Arcfra AECP vs Microsoft Hyper-V: VMware Alternatives Compared

Arcfra vs. Nutanix: Key Capabilities and Performance Comparison

Arcfra vs. VMware: VM Snapshot and I/O Performance Comparison