Red Hat partner ecosystem: A year of expanding choice for virtualized workloads on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

It has been about a year since the last review of Red Hat’s partner ecosystem for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. We've had a lot of success in the infrastructure space, including improvements to storage, networking, backup, and disaster recovery (DR), and we added 1500+ RHEL certified applications as validated for OpenShift Virtualization. With Red Hat Summit coming next week, it’s a great time to reflect on the progress we’ve made over the past year. There have been a lot of new partner integrations, and we wanted to highlight key areas including virtual desktop infrastructure, observability, networking, storage, virtual machine (VM) workloads, and cloud availability.

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)

For many customers, VDI is primarily how they interact with their VM based workloads, demonstrating why these partner integrations are so important. 

Ahead of Red Hat Summit last year, Citrix had not yet launched Citrix VDI support for OpenShift Virtualization. In August of 2025, however, that integration was finalized, and we've continued to work closely with Citrix to increase capabilities and value for our joint customers. 

Looking ahead, Citrix is planning to provide support for GPUs, secondary networking, and Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS) for OpenShift Virtualization in an upcoming release. Additionally, customers using Citrix Netscaler with Citrix VDI, Netscaler Virtual Private eXchange (VPX) for OpenShift Virtualization will help them protect and load-balance their VDI workloads.

Red Hat has also begun collaborating with Omnissa on Horizon 8 support for OpenShift Virtualization, with our engineering teams working closely together toward an upcoming release. 

Observability

Observability partner integrations provide deep, multilayered visibility to monitor the health of virtualized workloads that coexist with containers in a shared Kubernetes environment. By correlating data across hardware, hypervisor, and guest OS layers, these solutions help teams proactively identify issues, better optimize resource use, and provide a better end-user experience.

Cisco Splunk and Dynatrace have both recently validated their compatibility with OpenShift Virtualization, giving customers even more flexibility in how they monitor their critical VMs and infrastructure. 

Dynatrace has created an extension on their platform that provides comprehensive observability for VMs running on OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt). The extension uses the Dynatrace Operator to scrape Prometheus metrics exposed by KubeVirt, automatically discovering VMs and monitoring their resources and activities.

Cisco Splunk integrates with OpenShift Virtualization to ingest logs, metrics, and events from both VMs and the underlying Kubernetes platform. Using Splunk Collectors and Kubernetes-native integrations, it aggregates telemetry from cluster components, VM workloads, and infrastructure services to enable real-time analysis, anomaly detection, and troubleshooting. This provides a unified data layer for monitoring across virtualized and containerized workloads.

Successful workload migrations also depend on the storage and networking that sit beneath them. Customers have spent years investing in particular vendors and training teams to operate them, and our partner ecosystem work across both areas is designed to make sure those investments carry forward into OpenShift Virtualization, rather than being thrown away.

Storage

We've continued to expand validated integrations with the major enterprise storage vendors that customers are most likely already using. Pure Storage announced Portworx for KubeVirt last year, providing a software-defined storage option built specifically for VM workloads on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine. From there, we expanded our collaboration with NetApp even further, adding OpenShift Virtualization support to the NetApp Shift Toolkit and Trident Protect, along with new integrations across Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP on ROSA, and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes on OpenShift Dedicated.

Hitachi Vantara contributed an MTV storage offload framework to the upstream Forklift project, moving disk copy and format conversion from the network and host into the storage array. VSP One was the first array to ship a plug-in, with Dell PowerFlex, PowerMax, and PowerStore following via Dell Container Storage Modules. The plug-in went generally available in MTV 2.11.

We also continue to work with HPE on the Alletra Storage MP B10000 and the HPE CSI Operator for OpenShift, with IBM on FlashSystem and Storage Fusion (including Fusion Access for SAN), and with Lenovo, Lightbits, Arctera, and others. The full list of validated storage integrations is available on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog.

Networking

Networking has followed a similar pattern, with the goal of preserving customers' existing fabric investments, security policies, and operational tooling rather than requiring a parallel rebuild.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is now validated for OpenShift Virtualization, letting customers run their existing BIG-IP load balancers, WAF policies, and iRules as VMs alongside the workloads they protect. Palo Alto Networks has documented VM-Series firewall deployment on OpenShift Virtualization, including a User Defined Network model that places the firewall within the cluster's networking namespace.

In October 2025, we announced support for OpenShift on NVIDIA BlueField DPUs available as a technical preview, allowing customers to offload networking, security, and storage services from CPU to DPU (data processing unit) and free up cycles for application workloads. Cilium and Isovalent's certified container network interface (CNI) options provide further networking choice, and built-in OpenShift networking has advanced as well, with OVN-Kubernetes BGP support reaching general availability in OpenShift 4.19.

The common thread across both storage and networking is choice. Customers can keep using the technology and vendor they know and trust, with the teams already trained on it, while gaining a single platform for VMs and containers. That choice extends to where they run those workloads, too.

VM workloads

Over the past year, one of our major focuses has been on workloads, and we've been soliciting input from customers to learn what's most important to them when considering a migration to OpenShift Virtualization. This has given us some guidance about potential partners we might reach out to about future collaborations.

When collaborating, Red Hat offers partners assistance in the form of Red Hat Partner Subscriptions if that partner has a lab running OpenShift. If they don't, we can provide them with a hosted lab running OpenShift Virtualization through our OpenShift Partner Labs. If they run into problems, Red Hatters are available to help them with their questions or with hands-on technical assistance as needed. When the integration process is complete, we also help them get set up on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog which is accompanied by a statement of support for OpenShift Virtualization as a platform.

Through this collaborative process, we've had a lot of recent success, with more than 50 partner validations completed in 2025, and that momentum has continued into 2026. You can see the full list of validated workloads on this catalog page.

Cloud availability

We've also made a huge amount of progress with the expansion of OpenShift Virtualization across our OpenShift cloud services offerings. Customers can now run OpenShift Virtualization on Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud, and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud. This availability provides a consistent application platform for both VMs and containers across hybrid and multicloud deployments. We’ve also recently announced Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Service on IBM Cloud, the first fully managed OpenShift Virtualization offering, specifically built for VMs. This solution gives organizations a straightforward, managed path to run and scale VM workloads in the cloud without taking on additional operational overhead. 

We're also seeing increased partner alignment in these environments, so validated integrations and workloads are often available wherever customers choose to run OpenShift Virtualization. 

Let us help

If you're considering migrating your virtual workloads to OpenShift Virtualization, please contact us and let us know how we can help, and if there are any integrations you’d like us to consider. If you already have a Red Hat account, you can reach out by creating a case with our Partner Acceleration Desk. Click on the "General support" tile, then select "OpenShift Virtualization Integration." From there, fill out the description with any potential partners you think we should collaborate with. Also, be sure to check out our partner sessions at Red Hat Summit 2026 in Atlanta, GA.