Customer stories and continued momentum: OpenShift Virtualization sessions at Red Hat Summit 2026

Disruption in the virtualization market has not slowed down. The fallout from industry licensing and packaging changes continues to push organizations into decisions they were not planning to make this year, and for many, the timelines are getting shorter, not longer. Over the past 12 months, we have worked with hundreds of organizations navigating exactly this situation, and at Red Hat Summit 2026 (May 11–14, Atlanta), many of them will share what they have learned.

The early conversations were almost entirely about migration: how to move virtual machines (VMs) safely, how to avoid downtime, and how to get off the renewal clock. As time has gone by, those topics have come up more frequently and with greater urgency. Organizations are now going further, asking what they’ll land on after migration, not just what they leave behind. Some want a modern platform that runs their VMs today and gives them a nondisruptive path to containers, AI workloads, and modern operational practices when their business is ready. Others are using the move to consolidate previously separate virtualization and container environments onto a single platform with a single set of tools, eliminating the duplication that comes from running parallel infrastructure stacks.

And some organizations simply want a solid, well-supported platform where they can run their virtual machines, with predictable pricing and no surprises at renewal. That is a perfectly good reason to move, and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine was built to be that starting point. The option to grow into containers and modern application development stays open whenever it makes sense, but nobody is forced down that road. If you’re an experienced virtualization administrator, this platform preserves the operational patterns and VM management workflows you already know, while your skills grow more valuable to the organization over time, not less.

The adoption numbers reflect this range of customer goals. The number of VMs running on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization grew by 417% in 2025; clusters running VMs were up 93%, and accounts running VMs were up 70%. Red Hat Services has assessed more than 1.46 million VMs through its virtualization migration assessment engagements. Financial services, media/technology, and government are leading the adoption, though the growth is broad across verticals.

Four releases in 2025, built on customer feedback

Over the past 12 months, across releases 4.18 through 4.21 of OpenShift Virtualization, the pace and focus of engineering investment have tracked closely with what customers have been asking for. Migration has been a priority: moving existing VM workloads from other platforms onto OpenShift Virtualization more quickly, more safely, and with less disruption. Alongside that, investment in networking, multitenancy, storage, and data protection has been driven directly by feedback from organizations running production workloads. The third area of focus has been the onboarding experience for traditional virtualization administrators, with the engineering and UX teams focused on building an admin experience that feels familiar from day one.

The foundation beneath OpenShift Virtualization is mature because it’s built on the KVM hypervisor, which has been part of the Linux kernel since 2007 and runs at scale across almost every major public cloud provider. But Red Hat has delivered enhancements to those foundations in key areas over the past 12 months.

Migration

The migration toolkit for virtualization supports scalable migration plans for moving large numbers of VMs in parallel, with prechecks on VM configuration that catch issues before a migration starts. Migration network selection keeps production traffic unaffected during the move. In order to keep up with rising demand for faster migrations with minimal downtime, the toolkit now supports a storage offload capability pioneered by Hitachi Vantara and contributed to the open source Forklift community that allows certified storage partners to shift the data copy from the network to the storage array itself. Rather than moving VM data across the network, the storage system handles the transfer directly, preserving CPU and memory for running workloads. In Hitachi's testing with their VSP One block storage, this approach delivered up to 10x faster migration times, and the plugin architecture is open for other certified storage vendors to participate.

Networking, storage, and data protection

User Defined Networks (UDNs) reached general availability (GA) in OpenShift Virtualization 4.18, providing true tenant isolation with custom Layer 2 or Layer 3 segments, overlapping subnets, static IP assignment, and live migration support. BGP support in OVN-Kubernetes (GA in 4.20) connects cluster networks to external datacenter fabrics. Nondisruptive storage live migration is GA, and interoperability has been validated with Rubrik, Cohesity, NetApp, and IBM. 

Administrator experience

A dedicated virtualization administrator view in the console gives VM-focused teams folder-based navigation, bulk operations (including multiselect live migration and snapshots), network topology visualization, and per-VM resource monitoring. Customers with multiple clusters can manage them through a single pane of glass through Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed is integrated directly into the virtualization UI in 4.21, providing AI-powered troubleshooting that can translate familiar virtualization concepts into OpenShift terms, with 1-click import of VM logs and events.

Deployment flexibility

A 2-node configuration with arbiter is GA for edge high availability (HA) on x86 and Arm. Cloud support has been expanded to Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Google Cloud bare metal, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, giving organizations a consistent operational model for VM workloads across on-premise, edge, and public cloud environments.

Workload rebalancing

CPU load-aware rebalancing (GA in OpenShift Virtualization 4.20) automatically redistributes VM workloads across nodes based on actual CPU pressure, reducing the manual effort involved in keeping environments balanced as workload patterns shift. Cross-cluster live migration (GA in 4.21) takes this further, allowing administrators to move running VMs between different Red Hat OpenShift clusters with no downtime. That’s useful for cluster maintenance, regional rebalancing, or moving workloads to newer hardware without scheduling a maintenance window.

For virtualization administrators: Hands-on time at Red Hat Summit

If you have spent years managing VM environments, you know that evaluating a new platform from slide decks and data sheets only gets you so far. The questions that actually count (How does the console feel with hundreds of VMs? What does storage failover look like in practice? How do I troubleshoot a stuck migration?) only get answered with hands-on time.

The OpenShift Virtualization web-based management interface has been designed for people who manage VMs for a living. Folder-based, tree-structured organization, bulk operations, network topology views, and per-VM resource dashboards are all built into a dedicated admin interface that does not require you to think in Kubernetes terms to get your work done. The AI-powered virtual assistant integrated into the management interface can help administrators with their tasks by providing step-by-step instructions, links to related articles, and the ability to analyze provided YAML files and logs from any VM for troubleshooting. Your existing skills carry forward, and as the platform grows, those skills become more valuable to your organization, not less.

This year, Red Hat Summit provides multiple opportunities to get hands-on experience:

• Accelerating infrastructure modernization with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization (hands-on lab, runs Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday)
• Beyond the basics: Operationalizing Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization (hands-on lab, covers Day 2 operations in depth)
• OpenShift Virtualization Storage Deep Dive (storage architecture and implementation best practices)
• OpenShift Virtualization 2026 Roadmap (worth attending if you are making platform decisions this year)

Customer sessions at Red Hat Summit 2026

More than 20 organizations are presenting at Red Hat Summit this year about their OpenShift Virtualization projects, and the range of industries and use cases has widened even further since last year. Global banks, government agencies, defense contractors, telcos, and manufacturers are all represented, many of whom were in the early stages of evaluating the platform 12 to 18 months ago and are now running production workloads.

What is particularly useful about this year's lineup is the depth of experience these speakers bring. Several sessions cover topics that rarely get discussed publicly, from multi-datacenter disaster recovery configurations at a European bank to hardware ROI optimization at investment bank scale. These are the kinds of details that are hard to find in product documentation or analyst reports.

The full OpenShift Virtualization session list is live, and seats fill up quickly. 

Community Day: Monday, May 11

If you are attending Community Day on Monday, there are a couple of OpenShift Virtualization sessions running before the main event kicks off on Tuesday. These community-track sessions are worth catching if you are in Atlanta early.

• High availability strategies for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization workloads: Brigham Young University will take you through a deep dive into real-world HA scenarios for virtualization workloads, designed for platform engineers, architects, and operations teams
• CAE: Accelerate innovation with virtualization and AI: Learn how CAE uses OpenShift Virtualization to run traditional VMs alongside AI and containerized applications on a single platform

Financial services

Financial institutions have been some of the earliest and most active adopters of OpenShift Virtualization at scale since its introduction to the broader Red Hat OpenShift platform in 2020. This year's sessions cover production operations, hardware optimization, and modernization in regulated environments.

• Goldman Sachs' path to success: Production use of OpenShift Virtualization built on open source
• Morgan Stanley on maximizing hardware ROI: Performance and infrastructure investment
• Alior Bank's 9-month production experience: HA and disaster recovery across multi-datacenter configurations, with Hitachi Vantara
• Emirates NBD on hyperscalers: Running OpenShift Virtualization in public cloud
• Reimagining virtualization in financial services: Panel with Morgan Stanley and Emirates NBD

Telecommunications and sovereign cloud

Telco operators and managed service providers are adopting OpenShift Virtualization to modernize network infrastructure and meet sovereignty requirements while maintaining strict service-level agreements.

• Telco to tech co.: One NZ’s AI-native blueprint with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and automation: Automation-driven 4G/5G infrastructure
• Sopra Steria on sovereign cloud delivery: European sovereignty requirements and cloud modernization

Public sector and defense

Government and defense organizations at Red Hat Summit this year are covering ground that goes well beyond initial migration planning. NASA is sharing where they stand after completing their migration and talking about what expansion looks like. The Department of Veterans Affairs is presenting on how it is delivering new digital services to veterans and their families. The U.S. Navy is addressing what it takes to run OpenShift Virtualization in high-compliance, mission-critical environments.

• NASA's OpenShift Virtualization migration completion: Post-migration outcomes and expansion
• NASA roundtable: VM migration roadmap: Interactive planning discussion
• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on VA Platform One: New digital services for veterans

Manufacturing, automotive, and enterprise

Organizations in manufacturing and automotive are using OpenShift Virtualization to modernize complex, globally distributed environments while automating platform operations at scale.

• General Motors: Automating OpenShift Virtualization Day 0 to Day N: Platform lifecycle automation
• Siemens AG: Hypervisor to hybrid cloud: Global-scale journey
• CAE: Virtualization and AI innovation: Hybrid cloud modernization on OpenShift and Azure
• HRTec's 9x virtualization bill: Cost increase as catalyst for modernization, with Arctiq

Healthcare and specialized workloads

Healthcare organizations are using OpenShift Virtualization to modernize datacenter operations while meeting the availability and compliance requirements that clinical and research environments demand.

• Cleveland Clinic and IBM: From virtualization pressure to optimized operation: Datacenter modernization strategy
• InfoScale's multi-site disaster recovery for healthcare: Data protection and resilience, with hands-on lab
• High availability strategies: Real-world HA scenarios
• SiriusXM on high performance, low latency workloads: Performance-sensitive environments

Cross-industry panel

• Industry leaders panel (PA1840): Ford, One New Zealand, and Sutter Health compare notes on building infrastructure with OpenShift Virtualization

Partner ecosystem and migration sessions

One of the things Red Hat has always done well, across Red Hat OpenShift and, by extension, OpenShift Virtualization, is to build and maintain deep relationships with the vendors that enterprise customers already rely on. The partner ecosystem around OpenShift Virtualization spans storage, networking, backup and disaster recovery, compute platforms, public cloud services, and workload-specific providers. Organizations migrating to the platform are not starting from scratch with their existing infrastructure investments. The partners they already work with, across all of these areas, are validated and ready to go. This breadth of ecosystem support is not new for Red Hat, but it is worth highlighting because it directly addresses one of the biggest concerns organizations have when considering a platform move: Will my existing tools and vendors still work?

• AWS on VM uplift and shift
• Microsoft on hybrid virtualization best practices
• IBM on migrating with Fusion Access
• Portworx on scalable virtualization platforms
• NetApp on data and migration at scale
• WWT on migrating VMs en masse
• Accenture on migrating without disruption

Plan your week in Atlanta

Red Hat Summit 2026 runs May 11 through 14 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. Between customer breakouts, hands-on labs, and the product roadmap session, there is a full week of virtualization content for anyone involved in infrastructure decisions, migration planning, or platform operations.

Whether you’re weighing options, running pilots, or midway through a migration, several of the customer sessions feature organizations that were in the same position you are right now. The labs provide the kind of hands-on experience that is hard to get any other way. If you are making platform decisions this year, one session worth prioritizing is the Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization 2026 Roadmap on Wednesday, May 13, where Red Hat's product management and engineering leadership will walk through the current platform capabilities, the strategic direction for 2026, and demos of Day 2 virtualization operations, with time for direct Q&A.

These sessions drew full rooms last year, and the lineup this year is deeper. If you have not registered for Red Hat Summit yet, head to redhat.com/summit to secure your spot. If you are already attending, reserve your seats for the virtualization sessions and labs through the session catalog sooner rather than later.