Building a unified hybrid cloud strategy with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization may seem like a paradigm shift for some, but it's an essential part of transforming and consolidating your platforms into a modern, unified tech stack that helps match your company's skills and applications with its larger goals. This shift can cause some uncertainty, however, so let's take a closer look at this concept.

Red Hat OpenShift is the premier application development platform that runs anywhere Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will run. Whether you seek to deploy the platform and applications on-premise or across various hyperscalers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud, OpenShift Virtualization can accommodate your IT requirements. Since OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization can run anywhere RHEL runs, you have the option to either install OpenShift on bare metal or add a bare metal worker node to OpenShift.

In this diagram you can see how all virtualization components are integrated into the base OpenShift cluster. You can also see how this unites containers and virtual machines (VMs) into one comprehensive platform.

Why is this significant?

As we all know, IT costs are in constant motion, as companies are either looking to reduce costs to operate more efficiently or to migrate to the latest modern technology in hopes of improving productivity across the organization. OpenShift Virtualization can help achieve those goals.  

First, the virtual machine density that you can run within the platform is much higher than traditional infrastructure. This is mainly due to migrating virtual machines into a containerized workload, which also eliminates the memory and CPU overhead of the virtual machine’s original operating system. Additionally, OpenShift provides a load balancer to help shift traffic between the old virtual machine and a new containerized version of the application, which can further help reduce operational costs.  

Secondly, managing one platform of virtual machines and containerized workloads creates savings from the consolidation efforts.  

Lastly, every current RHEL subscription will run free of charge under OpenShift Virtualization, enabling organizations to realize additional cost savings.

In theory, this may seem straightforward, but if you're still uncertain, Red Hat Services can assist you on your journey towards using one consistent and unified platform. Red Hat Training offers specific OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization courses and certifications to help equip you with the skills needed to succeed with these technologies. In addition to our world-class learning curricula, Red Hat also offers professional consulting services backed by extensive expertise.    

Red Hat Consultants work alongside your teams to mentor and share knowledge using established blueprints that have been tested with customers around the globe. By working directly with support and product development teams, our consultants gain a holistic understanding of your company's technology and requirements, helping provide you with a comprehensive view of your IT landscape. Our methods have been shown to accelerate timelines on projects so they reach production sooner. We also help create customized road maps for successful adoption of our technology, based on your unique business objectives.

Since OpenShift covers a wide swath of the technology landscape, Red Hat Consultants are equipped to provide support on topics and technologies that have both direct and indirect interactions with adjacent tools and software. Some of these include networking, data storage, monitoring/alerting, security appliances, identity and certificate management as well as load balancers. Let Red Hat Services contribute to the development of a streamlined solution tailored to simplify operations within your organization. Speak to a consultant today for more information.