What’s new in OpenShift Virtualization 4.17

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization 4.17 is now generally available.

OpenShift Virtualization lets you migrate your existing virtual machine (VM)-based workloads to Red Hat OpenShift, helping to streamline operations on a modern platform. You can take advantage of the speed and simplicity of a comprehensive application platform, while preserving your existing virtualization investments. Here's some of what's new in our OpenShift Virtualization 4.17 release.

Performance and scale

• Improved workload density with safe memory overcommit. Safe memory overcommitment allows virtual machine memory to swap to disk during contention on the hypervisor. This enables hosting more VMs on the same infrastructure, improving your return on investment and allowing you to better meet your workload density needs. 
• Memory hotplug for non-disruptive scale-up of VM performance. CPU hotplug was also added in the OpenShift 4.16 release. 
• Live migration optimizations for busy workloads. As you bring more critical VM workloads like databases to OpenShift, they can be a challenge to migrate. With  advanced capabilities like live migration optimizations, you can more easily and efficiently migrate very active workloads.

Improved infrastructure optimization

• Automated VM workload balancing with descheduler. A descheduler profile will trigger actions when cluster nodes are being under utilized. When used with eviction policies, these two features provide the ability to distribute the workload across the cluster, avoid under/over utilized nodes and unnecessary resource contention.
  
  OpenShift, and therefore OpenShift Virtualization, does not have policies which attempt to evenly distribute, or balance, workloads across all nodes in the cluster. Instead, OpenShift’s features are designed to avoid resource contention without unnecessary actions, e.g. live migration, to workloads.

• VM storage live migration between storage classes (available as a tech preview).
• Improved two-site disaster recovery.
  • 4- and 5-node control plane architectures, supported only with bare metal clusters, provide additional options for resiliency and recovery after node or site failures, especially when clusters are critical (like hosted control planes) or spanned.

Simplified VM management

• Improved virtualization admin user experience with a virtualization admin focused view. This provides a dedicated console view for VMadmins. Taking away the non-essential UI elements from the OpenShift admin console gives a cleaner, more focused experience without having to work around the features and functions that you don’t need.

• Simplified and standardized cluster expansion. A streamlined user experience for joining nodes without BMC connectivity, regardless of how the cluster was deployed. It works with bare metal, non-integrated clusters, and other environments, providing a consistent and easy-to-execute way for admins to expand clusters while reducing concerns about complexity and the learning curve.

Continued functionality added for VM observability with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management

The new and redesigned virtualization-focused observability dashboards in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (ACM) 2.12 make monitoring your VM infrastructure across clusters easier than ever.

These dashboards provide insights into virtualization operator health, cluster performance, and VM inventories, enabling search and filtering by key VM attributes for efficient management and troubleshooting. You can also dive into individual VM metrics, including configuration, resource usage, active alerts, and identify VMs in extended unhealthy states.

With ACM 2.12, you gain expanded visibility into your OpenShift Virtualization environments, all from the convenience of the ACM console.

Warm migrations with migration toolkit for virtualization 2.7

To ease the virtual machine migration journey from alternative hypervisors to Red Hat OpenShift, you can use the migration toolkit for virtualization (MTV), an included feature of OpenShift. With MTV 2.7, users can execute warm migrations based on RHEL 9 inheriting features and bug fixes. This update reduces downtime for users when copying VM data to their target host, and allows them to run critical VM applications during the pre-copy stage.

Check out how to migrate your virtual machines with Red Hat through this interactive demo.

Customer success with OpenShift Virtualization

New York University (NYU) wanted a solution to reduce waste and cut costs. They also needed a solution that their teams could support and scale at the pace their organization needed. NYU noted that the “GUI is very beautiful, and the metrics are all right there… the monitoring stack is all in the places you’re used to looking for in OpenShift.” Listen to more about NYU’s story.

Orange International networks Infrastructures and Services is using OpenShift Virtualization because to them: “the format of the future is containers. Containers allow us to better isolate flows, particularly on mobile communications, and this better meets regulatory requirements.” Find out more in this article.

Tanobel is able to take advantage of the simplicity and speed of cloud-native application development while preserving existing virtual machine workload investments by using OpenShift Virtualization. Learn more about Tanobel’s experience here.

Guidance from experts

As we’ve met with customers that have a variety of infrastructure architectures, we have developed opinions, suggestions and recommended practices for OpenShift configurations when deploying VMs. Our experts have created the OpenShift Virtualization Reference Implementation Guide. Think of it as a set of opinionated guidance for small, medium and large deployments.

For an inside look at how our Red Hat Performance and Scale team gets the most out of their hardware, check out our new learning path, How to create and scale 6,000 virtual machines in 7 hours with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

Continued collaboration with ecosystem partners

We continue to have great success with our current ecosystem partners who’ve added support for OpenShift Virtualization. Read more about our partners who have rigorously tested VMs on OpenShift. We have also announced several new partnerships and continue to build out our ecosystem into 2025.

Veritas NetBackup improves data security for both containers and virtual machines running on OpenShift Virtualization.

Rubrik also announced their collaboration with OpenShift Virtualization. This collaboration empowers organizations with a unified platform to run VMs where virtualized environments can better protect data, automate protection, backup and help access data faster.

We are continuing to build out our partner ecosystem, so check with yours to see if there are preview solutions available with OpenShift Virtualization.

Learn about OpenShift Virtualization at an event near you

Red Hat is hosting numerous events globally that feature Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. Sign up for an event in your city using the links below. You’ll also see that we partner with AWS to feature OpenShift Virtualization on our managed offering, Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS .

• Red Hat Summit Connects
• Red Hat User Groups (RHUG) meetups
• Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Roadshow
• AWS Summit Connects

Wrap up

OpenShift Virtualization 4.17  continues to deliver on scalability and performance providing operational flexibility. With improved infrastructure optimization and simplified VM Management features added, you can migrate and manage your VMs in OpenShift with confidence.

Become a certified specialist

As with other Red Hat platforms, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and OpenShift, modernizing your infrastructure and operations is a skill set that is valuable for both your company and career. You can continue your training to become a Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Virtualization.

Learn more

• OpenShift Virtualization: Why Bring Your Virtual Machines to Kubernetes?
• OpenShift Virtualization blogs
• OpenShift Virtualization demos on demo.openshift.com
• OpenShift Livestream
• OpenShift TV library of recorded OpenShift videos and streams

Upstream project and community

Red Hat initiated and continues to be a leading contributor to KubeVirt, the upstream CNCF project that users and vendors are adopting to integrate virtual machines in Kubernetes. We are also seeing additional companies choosing KubeVirt as a proven key technology.

Explore the upstream innovation from the KubeVirt 2024 Summit.