SEZ "Alabuga" transferred all basic infrastructure services to the zVirt virtualization platform

2024: zVirt Implementation

The special economic zone (SEZ) of the production and industrial type "Alabuga" has introduced the zVirt platform of the Orion soft developer. The virtualization system ensured the operation of all basic infrastructure services of the SEZ and made it possible to scale server capacity. Orion soft announced this on September 30, 2024.

Orion soft

Previously, Alabuga used the VMware virtualization platform to ensure the operation of IT systems of the SEZ. However, after the vendor disconnected Russian customers from support, the management company had the goal of adapting to changes in the market and optimizing the IT infrastructure in order to continuously provide residents with a high level of IT services and maintain performance, fault tolerance and system security regardless of external factors. In this regard, the Alabuga SEZ decided to migrate to the Russian virtualization solution.

It was important for the company to find a product that will provide technical support in the long term and completely cover the needs that VMware previously met. In particular, the SEZ was important for clustering functions, "hot" migration of virtual machines, the ability to operate the hypervisor both on the host and under the Engine, support for storage systems.

After testing several solutions, including KVM and free software, Alabuga chose Orion soft's zVirt server virtualization system for implementation. Under its management, 16 infrastructure-loaded hosts operate in the SEZ. All applications of basic IT services are deployed in zVirt virtual machines, from "1C" to resource-intensive applications for 3D design.

In addition, a separate cluster of 8 hosts was built, designed for desktop virtualization with the ability to support graphics accelerators. It implements the zVirt bundle and the Termidesk VDI platform of the manufacturer Uveon - Cloud Technologies.

Our IT infrastructure upgrade project has been designed to bring large volumes of systems to a new virtualization platform. It was possible to migrate quickly enough - the deployment of zVirt took about a week. After that, Orion soft specialists continued to refine the system specifically for our requests for about six months, and eliminated the emerging bugs. We were aimed at using Russian products, but it was important for us to get a solution that was close in quality to what we "grew up on." zVirt closes all our current needs, and with the development of the product, we expect to see the full functionality that a foreign solution used to provide, "said Artyom Kuznetsov, senior architect of the IT infrastructure of the Alabuga SEZ.

In the future, the Alabuga SEZ plans to continue upgrading server capacity and increase the volume of IT infrastructure by at least half. The project has already started: by the end of 2024 it is planned to create a new cluster of 25 loaded hosts intended for the VDI solution. This scaling will create 3,000 new jobs.

It is important for a customer who is developing at such a high pace to see in the product not only all the functionality currently needed, but also the prospects for its expansion. "Alabuga" saw in the roadmap for the development of zVirt relevant improvements, and since the introduction, the system has already passed more than one update in the SEZ contour - from version 3.3 to 4.0. We continue to develop the product based on the needs of our customers. In the recent release of zVirt 4.2, we have already introduced Keycloak support, Hosted Engine duplication mechanism for increased fault tolerance, SDS support. And in the fall, we plan to implement a similar VMware mechanism for automatic cluster updates, management of virtual machine replication at the DSS level, as well as Storage DRS, "said Maxim Berezin, director of business development at Orion soft.