Imagine if Ford had a feature where, at the push of a button, you could transform someone's Chevy truck while it's sitting in a driveway.

ZeroStack isn't being quite that extreme, but the analogy kind of fits. The cloud startup announced a feature this week that converts VMware workloads to run in ZeroStack's cloud.

The announcement continues a recent ZeroStack offensive that has included partnerships with Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and the addition of enterprise-grade features, including high availability for VMware virtual machines.

ZeroStack's product is a managed OpenStack cloud in a box. The company supplies an appliance with all the hardware for a private cloud, but more significantly, ZeroStack handles the cloud management remotely. It turns the private cloud into a more hands-off experience.

The box runs on the open source KVM hypervisor. That means an enterprise that's running on VMware ESX hypervisors has some conversion to do. That's what ZeroStack handles with its one-click feature.

For Auction Software, a Dallas-based ZeroStack customer, the VMware conversion feature is "a capability that we probably wouldn't use very often, but we like having it," says Richard He, who handles operations for the company.

What Auction does use, though, is ZeroStack's ability to easily port workloads to and from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Five-year-old Auction develops customized software for auction websites. It often hosts those sites on AWS, but "we've been porting most of our clients onto ZeroStack," He says.