Open Source, Month One: 106 Countries & Regions Downloaded

Data as of 2026-09-11
Coverage window: 2026-08-12 – 2026-09-11 (first month of open source)

One month ago, we open-sourced ZSvirt.

Over the past month we kept building, kept learning, and kept connecting with people around the world. The first month brought new users, new ideas, new content, and plenty of moments worth sharing.

This is the first issue of ZSvirt Open Source Monthly. Let's look back at ZSvirt's first month — what happened around the world, and where we go from here.

01 — Product & Releases

ZSvirt Goes Open Source Worldwide

On 2026-08-14 we open-sourced ZSvirt's core IaaS engine under GPL-3.0. A month later, that code has reached 106 countries and regions (unique downloads, counted by ISO 3166) — further than we expected for an engine that has been public for a single month.

Open-sourcing also meant more than publishing code. In the same month we kept lowering the barrier to running ZSvirt: new OVA and QCOW2 images, an open-source MCP Server, and fuller documentation, so it can be brought up on VMware, VirtualBox, KVM, or any cloud host.

OVA & QCOW2 Packages

We added OVA and QCOW2 images for more flexible installation across different environments, further lowering the barrier to deploying ZSvirt. Importing an OVA or QCOW2 image into an existing vSphere or KVM environment brings up a complete ZSvirt environment in about five minutes.

The download center now offers four package types — ISO (5.41 GB), OVA (17.02 GB), QCOW2 (24.02 GB), and ZMigrate — each with a SHA256 checksum.

• Deploy ZSvirt Without Physical Hardware: qcow2 and OVA Images Are Here
• ZSvirt Download Center

MCP Server Open-Sourced

We open-sourced the companion ZSvirt MCP Server, letting AI assistants dynamically discover and call ZSvirt's 2,000+ OpenAPI endpoints. Only read-only APIs are exposed by default, supporting AI-driven interaction with and monitoring of virtualized environments. Install it from PyPI: pip install zsvirt-mcp-server.

Project Data

• GitHub: ZSvirt/zsvirt — 1,664 stars / 303 forks (as of 2026-09-11)
• Trendshift: reached #1 Java Repository of the Day (2026-08-16, #21 across all languages) and #2 Java Repository of the Week for week 34
• Media coverage: Open Source For You, GlobeNewswire, and others
• Download reach: 106 countries and regions, counted by ISO 3166

02 — Official Content

Over the past month we published a run of practical content covering installation, deployment, migration, and real-world use cases.

Best Practices

• ★ Evaluating ZSvirt as a VMware Alternative: A PoC Guide from Deployment to Migration (2026-08-27) — a complete evaluation guide: how to deploy ZSvirt, verify key capabilities, and plan a migration path away from VMware.
• ★ ZSvirt Migration in Practice: Three Ways to Migrate VMs from VMware (2026-08-19) — ZMigrate live migration (about five minutes per VM switch, up to 50 concurrent), OVF import, and VMDK upload — three approaches for different migration scenarios.
• ★ ZSvirt Architecture Explained: How a Production-Proven Virtualization Engine Is Built (2026-08-17) — a breakdown of ZSvirt's architecture: one control plane supporting 10,000+ hosts, 768 vCPUs per VM, and the engineering trade-offs behind it.
• ZSvirt Quick Start: From ISO to Your First VM, Step by Step — deploy in 30–40 minutes with All-in-One mode and create your first VM.

★ marks this month's editor's picks.

Official Videos

As of 2026-09-11, the official ZSvirt YouTube channel has published 10 videos:

03 — Community & Creators

ZSvirt Community Discord

The ZSvirt Community Discord is now open — a place for users and community members to talk, ask questions, share experience, and help each other out.

Join ZSvirt Community →

You can also find us on GitHub Discussions, LinkedIn (ZSvirt Community), and X (@ZSvirt) — or email us at community@zsvirt.io.

ZSvirt Storytellers — Phase 1: YouTube Challenge

We launched ZSvirt Storytellers, inviting creators and community members to share their stories, hands-on experience, and perspectives on ZSvirt.

The challenge is still running. As of 2026-09-11, 3 participants have submitted videos and 5 more are in progress:

	#01 vikas9452-git (India) — the first participant from India, publishing ZSvirt vs VMware vs Proxmox on the Labs Hands On channel (72.2k subscribers), with 10k views.
	#02 Profe Carlos Leal (Nicaragua) — the first participant from Nicaragua, publishing the Spanish-language ZSvirt: ¿Rival de Proxmox VE y sucesor de VMware?, with 19k views.
	#03 sriramya11 (India) — published What is ZSvirt? VMware Alternative? on 2026-09-07.

ZSvirt Storytellers Phase 1: YouTube Challenge (GitHub Discussion #8)

Third-Party Creators

	★ Byron Xie — a ZSvirt comparison series (including ZSvirt vs Proxmox and three more videos), with hands-on benchmarks.
	★ SoftsWeb — ZSvirt: The Best VMware Alternative You Need to Try, 43k views — among the most-watched third-party ZSvirt videos to date.
	★ Libre-Data — I Tested This New Platform for Virtual Machines, a test on real hardware with 10k views.
	AskGuru — a 44-minute uncut installation walkthrough from a blank machine to a working platform, nothing trimmed and nothing skipped.
	hairong lu — a full feature walkthrough of ZSvirt, stepping through the platform feature by feature.

★ marks this month's editor's picks.

Community Discussion

• Hacker News — Show HN: ZSvirt – A lightweight, scalable open source virtualization platform picked up 72 points and 14 comments, sparking discussion about open-source virtualization and vendor lock-in.
• GitHub Discussions — installation and usage Q&A stayed busy: an installation thread (11 replies), a ZMigrate deployment discussion (9 replies), an aarch64 image question, a QCOW2 installation issue, and more. Thanks to everyone who asked and answered.

04 — Contributors

The progress of our first month came from everyone who submitted code, reported issues, translated docs, disclosed security findings, and took part in Q&A.

Thanks to Our Community

Thanks to the community members who contributed code, reported issues, and joined the discussion this month (in no particular order):

tllovesxs, chayu163, Jorge Perez, libre-data, shuchaoma, fankejing-just, techknight2020, dawnorigin

Security Disclosure

Thanks to the following two community members, who reported security-related findings to security@zsvirt.io. We're glad to credit them publicly:

• Svector Anu
• Jorge Perez

If you find a potential security issue in ZSvirt, we'd welcome a note at security@zsvirt.io as well.

05 — What's Next

The first month is only the beginning. From here we'll keep pushing on two fronts: product and community.

Product

Next up is continued work on hardware compatibility and product capabilities: aarch64 support is under evaluation and GPU components are on the roadmap. We'll also establish a formal release process (GitHub Release / Tag) so that version evolution is clearer and traceable.

For the rest of 2026 H2, the roadmap centers on five areas:

• Security — add disk encryption and live-migration encryption for virtual machines.
• DRS & VM migration — more flexible migration options: data-disk-only migration; hot and cold migration for SAN scenarios, and cold migration for NFS.
• ZMigrate — ZMigrate 2.1 adds pre-checks that mitigate risk in complex migrations, alongside simpler and smarter migration workflows.
• Operations — more monitoring metrics (VM CPU ready time, VM disk read/write latency, network packet drop rate, host CPU ready time); finer-grained log levels for external syslog forwarding; NVMe and FC device monitoring including IOPS and latency; and built-in QXL drivers in VMTools for better VM console display and resolution.
• Inventory management — extend storage and VM registration to cover same-site registration.

Community

• VirtWatch Weekly — our virtualization and open-source infrastructure weekly will keep publishing (Episode 1 is on YouTube).
• Storytellers Phase 1 and later phases — Phase 1 closes on 2026-09-28, and further phases are in planning. More creators are welcome to join.

06 — Get Involved

Thank you for every download, every install, every video, and every piece of feedback.

One month. One world. More to come.

— ZSvirt Team