How Red Hat partners can help meet your VM platform needs

Virtualization technologies have long played an important role in corporate IT strategies. Once a vendor choice is made, companies typically keep their virtual machine (VM) estate on the same platform for years, rarely shopping around for new options.

Recent market changes have opened the door for new VM solutions and vendor considerations, including the possibility of application modernization. Most companies have understood the importance of adopting new ways to deploy and manage the lifecycle of their applications, but they have also realized that the required technologies often call for platforms that are radically different from those used by their applications running on VMs. This means adding complexity to their IT infrastructure, increasing costs and difficulty for administrators.

That said, however, organizations are realizing that maintaining their current virtualization platform is no longer convenient or cost effective. So if you're going to move your applications that need to run on VMs, why not choose a platform where you can also benefit from modern applications that are cloud-native and run in containers?

This is what Red Hat OpenShift offers—a single platform where you can deploy, run and manage all your applications, whether they are legacy (thanks to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization) or modern. With OpenShift, you'll gain both cost savings and ease of operation.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and partners

Red Hat also has an extensive partner ecosystem, and this is particularly important when it comes to selecting a new virtualization platform. Where other platforms offer out-of-the-box solutions with predefined technologies, OpenShift Virtualization allows you to choose the solutions that best suit your needs in terms of networking, storage and data protection. The partners in the Red Hat partner ecosystem are certified, so you can rest assured that their software will run smoothly on OpenShift.

If, for example, customers wish to keep using the storage solution they have in their current virtualization platform, they can bring it to OpenShift Virtualization. But if they are looking for another option, moving to OpenShift Virtualization will let them reassess and possibly choose a new vendor that offers them a better solution for their use cases. Some of the storage vendors that partner with Red Hat are NetApp and Portworx.

When it comes to data protection, partners like Portworx, Trilio and Veeam Kasten offer robust and innovative solutions for backup/restore, disaster recovery and ransomware protection.These help with data security and availability wherever OpenShift clusters are deployed, including on bare metal, private cloud or public cloud.

Security is another important consideration when choosing an application platform. It’s essential to control network segmentation and to define and apply clear network policies so that each team has access to the resources they need. Some Red Hat partners that provide networking solutions for OpenShift are Cisco, F5 and Tigera.

The Red Hat partner ecosystem is not limited to software and hardware. It also includes a wealth of services partners that can help advise customers on potential solutions. Depending on their use cases and needs, service partners can help customers smoothly migrate to OpenShift Virtualization and  establish seamless administration of the platform once the migration has been completed.

Wrapping up

OpenShift Virtualization offers a comprehensive alternative to legacy virtualization platforms. It helps customers avoid vendor lock-in and rising costs so they can continue to manage their applications that run on VMs, just as they used to do on their previous solutions. It also provides the foundation for modernizing their applications when they are ready to do so at their own pace. Having a single platform for all types of applications can help lower costs and simplify administration tasks.

The vast Red Hat partner ecosystem gives customers the ability to build their solution exactly as they want, without having to go with solutions imposed by other platform vendors.

Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, and check the full list of infrastructure and services partners that complete a robust virtualization platform. If you want to start exploring migrating to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, check out this architecture.