OpenShift Virtualization: Why Bring Your Virtual Machines to Kubernetes?

This blog is an update to this earlier guide.

Open hybrid cloud is Red Hat's recommended strategy for architecting, developing, and operating a hybrid mix of applications, delivering a truly flexible cloud experience with the speed, stability, and scale required for digital business transformation. Hybrid done right is not just for new projects or for your future requirements. It should allow you to meet your current challenges and opportunities head-on, while positioning you for the future. 

If you are like most of our customers, you have a mix of new and old when it comes to the applications that you need to run your organization. A large mix of applications are built with traditional architectures and traditional languages. Application modernization is all about the digital transformation of your legacy or heritage applications to enable them with new capabilities and deliver them quickly. It's about improving developer productivity and increasing the efficiency of operations by enabling and enhancing the DevOps capabilities of your organization. All of this allows users greater speed to market with flexibility, increasing innovation at a cost savings.

Customers want to begin modernizing VMs, but the all-or-nothing approach to containerization is difficult. Even though containers are gaining traction, more than 80% of workloads are still in virtualized environments.

What if virtualization itself can evolve to being a native citizen where all the innovations that are happening in Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation project ecosystem could instantly be made available to the applications in virtual machines? This transformation will provide a practical path for traditional VM-based workloads to be added to new and existing applications where they can then be decomposed into microservices on containers over time, or maintained as VMs.

This transformation is made possible through KubeVirt, an incubating project of CNCF.

Incorporating KubeVirt into OpenShift as OpenShift Virtualization provides Red Hat a unique opportunity to present to customers a single platform for applications that leverage either a subset of, or all of, virtual machines, containers, and serverless together. Virtual machines can leverage OpenShift features like Service Mesh, GitOps, Pipelines, and Software Defined Networking.  

Key Features for OpenShift Virtualization

OpenShift provides an efficient, highly available and resilient infrastructure for your applications. OpenShift Virtualization runs directly on bare metal, optimizing the resource efficiency. The built-in live migration feature for virtual machines along with a resilient storage layer like OpenShift Data Foundation provide an architecture that can support zero data loss and zero downtime. OpenShift’s capability of non-disruptive over-the-air upgrades helps provide a highly available environment without interrupting your VM workloads.  

Security is built in for VMs by being part of OpenShift. OpenShift delivers security across build, deploy, and run for DevSecOps. OpenShift is built on  a secure Linux distribution and is Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) compliant.

While being part of OpenShift brings the declarative nature of managing applications, we have also added intuitive UI for managing virtual machines to OpenShift for customers coming from traditional virtualization environments.

Intuitive UI for managing virtual machines in a containerized environment

We are seeing strong adoption of OpenShift Virtualization and have a very active roadmap that is published as part of what’s next for OpenShift. Based on the use cases that OpenShift Virtualization is seeing adoption, we have additional features being added for each of the themes listed below:

Look out for the next blog post where we will share how our customers are using OpenShift Virtualization.