French Hosting Firm Hosteur Dumps VMware, Bets Future on Huawei Infrastructure
PARIS – French hosting provider Hosteur is undergoing a meaningful infrastructure shift, abandoning vmware in favor of Huawei’s DCS and Proxmox solutions, citing superior support and a forward-looking approach to containerization and cloud-native technologies. The move, which began last June, reflects a growing trend of organizations seeking alternatives to established virtualization giants.
Founded 22 years ago, Hosteur initially focused on website hosting for individuals and small businesses-a segment still serving approximately 4,000 customers.However,the company has expanded to serve around 200 businesses requiring application hosting,including certified healthcare entities operating under stringent “Health Data Host” regulations.
“We were looking for more with exceptional performances,” explained Florent Gentric, of Hosteur. The company’s decision to embrace Huawei’s technologies wasn’t immediate. Several years ago,Hosteur identified the need to host client applications in container format under Kubernetes.At the time, Huawei’s pilot CSI (container Storage Interface) was a relatively obscure offering. “The local team introduced us to its developer in Germany. No other supplier would have offered us this!” Gentric recalled.
This early access allowed Hosteur to quickly deploy a solution utilizing Huawei’s Dorado SSD arrays for Kubernetes, mirroring their existing VMware setup. “With the same levels of service, with the same ease of managing several clients on the same bay,” Gentric stated.
The transition extends beyond Kubernetes.Hosteur is also adopting Huawei’s DCS (a KVM-based open source solution with commercial support) and its eDME steering layer – Huawei’s equivalent to VMware’s vCloud Director. Gentric highlighted the alignment between DCS’s design philosophy, modeled after Huawei’s public cloud offerings, and hosteur’s business needs, enabling the potential for “finer control functions” for customers.
Hosteur initiated migration from VMware to DCS last June, utilizing Huawei’s MigrationDirector tool. “They supported us on the first migration and trained us on eDME, so that we were then self-sufficient,” Gentric said. As of now, approximately 20% of Hosteur’s virtual machines have been migrated, primarily internal applications, with a detailed migration plan underway for customer VMs.
Notably, no clients have yet refused migration to DCS, according to Gentric, due to the initial focus on lower-level functional layers. He also revealed that VMware made no attempt to retain Hosteur’s business, stating, “apparently, we are not big enough for them to be interested.”
Hosteur’s long-term strategy envisions 80% of its infrastructure running on DCS, with the remaining 20% utilizing Proxmox. Kubernetes will be deployed on VMs within both environments.
