Case Study: Xiamen University achieves a scalable, reliable digital campus with VMware vSAN

VMware Helps Xiamen University Cope with Challenges of Digital Campus Building

Xiamen University, a leading Chinese university with a newly established Malaysia branch campus, faced growing demands from mobile internet adoption and campus expansion: it needed a stable, secure and easy-to-manage IT architecture that could scale unpredictably for the branch while replacing the main campus’s complex, high‑O&M FC storage environment. The university required unified support for email, research, campus services and an affiliated hospital, plus simplified disaster recovery and lower operational costs.

XMU deployed VMware vSAN and a virtualization-first architecture—initially on a 4‑node cluster at the Malaysia campus and later across the main campus (33 nodes, ~600 VMs, ~70% on vSAN). The software‑defined solution enabled fast horizontal scaling, resilient operation (15‑minute cluster start, robust recovery from power outages), and broad service support (large email system, logs, hospital databases), while reducing storage costs by about 30% and improving virtual platform delivery/change efficiency by over 90%, with simpler O&M and remote DR.

Xiamen University

He Weiping

Senior Engineer Information and Network Center