As the virtualization space evolves, many customers need to update their traditional virtualization strategies. Organizations are choosing to adopt a virtualization strategy to avoid the rising costs of managing legacy systems and the inability to scale to meet business demands1. A feature of Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization allows users to run and manage virtual machine workloads alongside containers. It supports both hybrid and multicloud environments and provides one unified platform for virtual machines and containers.
Migrating to OpenShift Virtualization offers the flexibility to modernize applications and infrastructure at your own pace, provides an opportunity to connect and centralize environments, and helps you retire your legacy systems faster. In turn, you can reduce infrastructure costs, increase efficiency, and accelerate innovation2.
But, first, you’ll need a well-planned roadmap to migrate your virtual machines quickly and safely. This may seem like a daunting and complex task, however, the cost of staying behind may be even bigger—limiting your potential to innovate and grow. Red Hat Consulting recognizes the difficulties our customers face that can impede a successful migration—from unexpected downtime to compatibility issues—and provides tailored solutions for efficient migration. In this article, we’ll explore the key considerations to achieve a smooth virtual machine migration and a successful transformation for your organization through Red Hat Services.
Day 0: Plan and design for a strong foundation
1) What is your workload complexity and timeline for migration?
Moving to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization helps organizations deploy and maintain both virtual machines and containerized workloads using a common, consistent set of established enterprise tools. Managing multiple platforms for containers and virtual machines can lead to increased complexity, resource fragmentation, and operational overhead. Unified platforms that streamline infrastructure deployment, management, and monitoring across both virtual machines and containers can help you optimize resource use, eliminate duplicate efforts, and quickly adapt to diverse workloads.
Start with a Virtualization Migration Assessment with Red Hat Consulting to understand existing architecture, workloads, and determine your migration complexity. Together, we’ll determine workload complexity and map out a timeline for the complete migration.
2) What enablement will my team need?
A supportive, open-minded culture fosters innovation, encourages learning, and reduces resistance to adopting new technologies. Adopting a new virtualization platform is more than a technical challenge and requires support from your executive team to prioritize efforts across the organization. Infrastructure teams should prepare for the inevitable learning curve by supporting teams early in the migration journey with migration experts and targeted training to build the skills to deploy and maintain virtual machines on a new platform.
Day 1: Focus on deployment, migrate to your target environment, cease deployments from your previous platform, and initiate deployments from your new one.
3) How do I prioritize workloads for migration?
After completing the Virtualization Migration Assessment of your current platform and workload complexity, you’ll want to select the first group of workloads to prioritize for the migration. Start by conducting confidence testing of easy, medium, and hard workloads to validate your assumptions about migration complexity. Focus on targeting the lowest-risk workloads and minimizing the overall footprint of your legacy platform. Define and track key consumption indicators to hone your approach and achieve value faster.
4) How should I architect and configure my network?
Virtual machines are typically either directly connected to the underlying networking fabric, or connected to a virtualized networking layer to provide more flexibility to manage traffic. To support these concepts, OpenShift Virtualization offers a few options with many advanced configuration parameters. At a high level, the two main approaches that can be customized to fit the needs of the virtual machines are:
- Pod network: Connects virtual machines to the pod network. Like container workloads, this means taking advantage of the available options to expose the machines outside the cluster.
- Linux or OVS bridge: Supports configurations to dynamically define the required key networking technologies—such as bonding and VLANs—to connect virtual machines directly to the underlying networks.
Note: Most of the migrations to OpenShift Virtualization will fit into the second networking approach (using bridges), which maps layer-2 networks directly as network interfaces to virtual machines.
5) How should I integrate my storage and backup integration?
Another important architectural decision is selecting the proper storage back end for your cluster. Red Hat is committed to building and maintaining a robust partner ecosystem and will provide guidance on selecting the appropriate partner for the environment.
Red Hat OpenShift uses the industry standard Container Storage Interface (CSI) to consume storage from different back ends. You’ll select a product that can support:
- Virtual machine live migrations in the environment.
- Virtual machine snapshots and clones.
There are two different ways to approach a virtual machine backup: either via OpenShift APIs for data protection or using a third-party data protection vendor. When evaluating a third-party vendor, consider the following:
- Can the solution support different operating systems, databases, and applications at scale and adapt to different environments (on-premise, cloud, hybrid)? Will there be an impact on the system performance, backup speed, and storage efficiency?
- Does the vendor offer robust encryption methods for data at rest and in transit, and comply with relevant security standards, such as GDPR or HIPAA?
- Does the vendor offer comprehensive recovery capabilities, including point-in-time recovery, fast restores, and disaster recovery options? How easily can the solution restore data in case of a system failure?
- How is the quality of customer support, response times, and availability? Some vendors offer 24/7 support and personalized assistance, which is critical during emergencies.
6) How will teams provision and deploy virtual machines on the new platform?
OpenShift Virtualization offers flexible and robust ways to provision virtual machines. One method is the traditional ClickOps, which provides a user-friendly, straightforward way to create virtual machines without requiring extensive scripting or programming knowledge. For those looking for a more scalable method via automation, the API or Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform supports the provisioning and management of virtual machines through reusable playbooks. This approach is ideal for teams that wish to streamline deployments and enforce consistent configurations across environments or even implement an automated event-driven, self-service model for provisioning standard virtual machines. If you have an existing landscape of virtual machines and have already developed automated provisioning, it’s essential to ensure that automation is refactored to work with OpenShift Virtualization APIs.
Additionally, teams can use GitOps to bring a version-controlled, declarative approach to the lifecycle management of virtual machines. With GitOps, configurations and desired states are stored in a Git repository and updates to virtual machines are triggered directly from code commits. These configurations can also be called as part of an Ansible automation playbook. This way, the operator can easily manage virtual machine configurations across multiple clusters, trace changes, and enhance security through code reviews, making the provisioning and management of virtual machines on OpenShift Virtualization both agile and security-focused.
7) How quickly can I migrate to the new platform?
While migrating virtual machines, it’s essential to consider factors such as the bandwidth between virtualization environments and the type of migration (cold vs. warm) to ensure a smooth and efficient process. Deploying the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization provides the interface to efficiently migrate your virtual machines from alternative providers to Red Hat OpenShift. By taking advantage of the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization and OpenShift Virtualization, organizations can facilitate the continuous transfer of virtualized workloads, enhancing operational efficiency and reducing migration complexities.
Additionally, the combination of Ansible Automation Platform methodologies and the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization can help address pre- and post-processing needs, while replacing repetitive, manual, and time-consuming tasks with automated workflows (such as inventorying existing hardware, networks, and cluster deployments). Teams can take advantage of automated processes for migrating virtual machines at scale. These automated processes provide comprehensive tools to move applications and data with minimal disruption, paving the way for self-service capabilities and a smoother transition to a modern, cloud-native environment within Red Hat OpenShift.
8) How will teams maintain, scale, and automate the virtual machine platform throughout its lifecycle?
Those who experience large and complex cluster deployments turn to Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes to efficiently control clusters and applications from a single console—deploying applications, managing multiple clusters, and enforcing policies consistently at scale. Using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, operations teams can build and configure hub clusters, define and build governance policies, and manage container infrastructure under a single pane of glass.
Day 2: Post-migration focus on maintenance and optimization
9) How will teams monitor the health and performance of the platform and manage their virtual machine Day 2 operations?
Setting up alerts to identify pod failures (including virtual machines), node problems, or network disruptions before they affect your applications is critical for your business and an essential Day 2 operations component. Red Hat OpenShift has built-in observability tools that can provide this functionality and is able to integrate with other third-party monitoring systems and tools.
For Day 2 operations of migrated workloads, it's crucial to ensure ongoing management and optimization, including monitoring performance metrics, validating workload stability, overall lifecycle management of the virtual machines, and fine-tuning resource allocations to create and maintain efficiency. The combination of Ansible Automation Platform and OpenShift Virtualization allows you to automate management of many Day 2 tasks across the entire VM lifecycle.
Red Hat Services can help
As IT leaders make changes to modernize their virtualization infrastructure through containers and Kubernetes, it’s important that IT professionals equip themselves with the skills needed to succeed using technologies like OpenShift Virtualization. The Managing Virtual Machines with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization (DO317) course and exam bundle teaches essential skills to create and manage virtual machines on Red Hat OpenShift using the Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization operator and then validates those skills through Red Hat Certification. Now through September 30, 2025, you can save 70% on the bundle! Plus, stay tuned for our new virtualization courses this year.
Whether you’re in the process of planning for your migration or ready to evolve your operations, Red Hat Technical Account Managers harmoniously integrate with your project to help address risks reliably, enhance productivity, and support your long-term operations.
Red Hat Consulting is here to help simplify the process, providing expert insights and tailored strategies to ensure an efficient migration. Take the first step in your journey with our Virtualization Migration Assessment. We’ll join your team to run a short series of 2-hour, on-site workshops to assess the current environment and gather requirements and goals for your desired future state. We’ll work together to understand and analyze infrastructure and workload complexities to build a successful migration plan. Talk to a Red Hatter today.
Sugli autori
Julio Villarreal Pelegrino is a seasoned technology and enterprise architecture expert with over twenty (20) years of experience in the software and IT industry. As a Distinguished Architect at the Global Services Office of Technology, Julio is vital in offering advanced open-source technology solutions to clients worldwide. In his current role, he helps customers shape their digital strategies, architecting private and hybrid clouds and automation and translating complex business needs into practical solutions.
Julio has extensive experience in big enterprise computing environments across different sectors. He's skilled in various technologies, including OpenStack, Kubernetes, Ansible, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenShift, and several programming languages. His technical skillset makes him the perfect partner and advisor for companies in their digital transformation journey.
Before joining Red Hat, Julio gained valuable experience at major companies like Oracle and Dell, taking on essential roles in their IT and Services departments. His broad experience has given him a solid foundation in tech and a keen sense of how to apply it effectively in business.
In short, Julio Villarreal Pelegrino isn't just a tech expert; he's a problem-solver and strategist who helps businesses leverage technology to achieve their goals. His profile showcases a commitment to innovation, leadership, and delivering real-world solutions.
Ed’s organization drives customer success with Red Hat’s OpenShift platform, including platform design, implementation, platform engineering, VM and app migration, and application modernization and developer experience. With a rich background in cloud and cloud native technologies and ways of working, Ed’s group derisks and accelerates customers migrations today, to the platform that will power the future of their digital businesses.
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