What’s New in OpenShift Virtualization 4.18

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization 4.18 is now generally available, enabling you to migrate your existing virtual machine (VM) workloads to Red Hat OpenShift. With OpenShift, you can streamline operations on a modern platform and take advantage of a fast, simple, and comprehensive application platform while preserving your existing virtualization investments. Check out what's new in our OpenShift Virtualization 4.18 release. 

Choose your journey path for virtual machines

Red Hat makes it easy to  migrate your workloads into OpenShift Virtualization

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine makes it easy to get a new future-proof, virtualized environment up and running. OpenShift Virtualization Engine is a virtualization-only edition of OpenShift that simplifies VM migration and offers a cost-effective alternative for organizations seeking to run and manage VMs

Each subscription covers up to 128 cores across dual sockets to run VMs, allowing you to save precious space by using powerful, dense hardware. OpenShift Virtualization Engine is the platform for all of your datacenter virtualization needs, offering the ability to deploy and manage VMs using the Red Hat KVM hypervisor, orchestrated by Red Hat OpenShift. 

Red Hat has also introduced Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization that offers a cost effective way to bring the premier multi-cluster fleet management capabilities for OpenShift to OpenShift Virtualization Engine. 

To facilitate scale-out deployments of virtualization, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform leverages known tools for automation, reducing the number of manual tasks required for large scale operations, such as migrations and common administrative operations.

Modernize your virtual applications using OpenShift at your own pace

OpenShift Virtualization is a core feature of  all OpenShift editions, enabling the management of VMs in a hybrid cloud environment.  You can move from OpenShift Virtualization Engine to OpenShift Container Platform or OpenShift Platform Plus license for your cluster when you are ready for new workloads. 

Moving to OpenShift Container Platform or OpenShift Platform Plus enables you to incorporate containers as your needs evolve, to include cloud native applications and artificial intelligence (AI). OpenShift Virtualization helps modernize VM-based applications, providing a unified environment for VMs, containers and serverless technologies for maximum flexibility. 

Reist Telecom AG chose to modernize with OpenShift Virtualization 

Reist Telecom AG, a Swiss telecommunications and information technology company, chose to migrate their VMs to OpenShift Virtualization on OpenShift Platform Plus to expand their virtualization environment towards a cloud-native platform. A few benefits that Reist and its customers have experienced using OpenShift Virtualization include:

• 50% decrease in virtual machine licensing costs
• More efficient and streamlined operations
• More reliable user experience
• Reduced downtime for end customers with automated code releases

Patric Siegrist, Chief Architect of Reist Telecom AG, remarked:

“Adopting Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on top of OpenShift was simple and cost-effective and enables us to bridge the VM and container worlds and remain adaptable in our fast-moving market. Our work with Red Hat has helped us lead the way as a best practice example of cloud migration that in turn positions us to help our customers transform their own organizations.”

Read more about Reists Telecom AG’s experience.

Simplification while diversifying hybrid cloud experience

The OpenShift Virtualization team delivered several enterprise features over the last year including: 

• the ability to hotplug, oversubscribe resources and add a virtualization administrator focused view, as well as
• multi-cluster observability
• streamlined and scaled migration processes and
• a storage and data protection ecosystem

OpenShift Virtualization 4.18 continues to deliver on the benefits of simplified administration and resource optimization while also providing VM-friendly networking enhancements,  expanded cloud platforms, and several enhancements to the migration toolkit for virtualization (MTV).

Simplified virtualization management experience

Users now have a simplified way to view and navigate  their VMs with the new tree-view navigation (technical preview). Another technical preview feature enables users to logically group VMs into folders, allowing for a more granular grouping than the namespace level. This new view provides more efficient way to navigate between VMs with a single click. The top of the tree view also adds a simple but yet powerful search for items in the tree.

Starting and stopping a few VMs at once is now easier with the ability to select multiple VMs and trigger the required action. Another enhancement is the ability to view new resources columns that provide an easy way to see the resources used by each VM in the virtual machines list. As we already display multiple columns, to see the new columns you will need to add them using the column selector.

User-defined tenant networks for VMs

Out-of-the-box networking provides the granularity that VM admins are accustomed to. These tenant networks can be set per project and support overlapping subnets. OpenShift Virtualization also supports setting up these networks at cluster level by the cluster admin. Each network provides a routable, managed L2 overlay to VMs. This functionality works both on-premises and in the public cloud. 

VM storage live migration 

OpenShift Virtualization supports live migration of VMs across nodes in a cluster from our initial launch. Another popular feature request is to be able to migrate storage between storage classes.  Storage live migration lets customers migrate VM disks to a different storage class, regardless of whether the associated workloads are active or idle. This is especially useful for onboarding new storage appliances, retiring legacy infrastructure or rebalancing workloads across different storage arrays. The migration process is non-disruptive to running VM workloads. With this enhancement, OpenShift Virtualization not only simplifies storage management but also demonstrates our platform's ability to handle dynamic storage requirements without compromising workload integrity.

Other improvements for storage migration include the ability to now migrate hotplugged VM disks to a new storage class. Volume migration is also possible between storage classes that provide filesystem and block storage. When planning the migration, the optimal configuration for the target storage will be suggested automatically and the volumes will be converted to filesystem or block mode as appropriate. Users will also have better efficiency allocation of thinly-provisioned storage and faster migration with sparse detection. Migrated VM storage is labeled to easily identify the original source volumes, so admins can reclaim that storage once the migration is complete. 

Microsoft Windows support 

Windows is an important workload for our customers and we have great collaboration with Microsoft. OpenShift Virtualization was validated successfully on Windows Server 2025 on the day of its release. With 4.18, OpenShift Virtualization has successfully finished the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) for Windows Server 2025.  You can find the complete list of supported guest operating systems here.

vTPM enhancements 

 OpenShift Virtualization supports adding a virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) device to a new or existing virtual machine.  4.18 brings several enhancements around vTPM, namely block device support, support for ReadWriteOnce (RWO) devices and performing snapshot and clone operations on vTPM enabled VMs. vTPM RWO device support enables virtual TPM devices for VMs that do not need to be live migrated or only have access to non-shared RWO storage classes. Support for block-based storage enables a common storage option. In addition, snapshots, clones and other VM operations are now also supported with this improvement.

Scaled operations through multicluster virtualization enhancements

We recently published two articles about monitoring at scale. The first covers OpenShift virtualization clusters overview and single cluster overview. The second dives into three additional dashboards around single virtual machine view, virtual machines inventory and virtual machines over time status. We are releasing an early preview with a Grafana dashboard for determining and recommending the right CPU and memory for virtual machines on different clusters. We also are introducing policy-based backup and restore of VMs, and .kubevirt.io resources on OpenShift hub or OpenShift managed clusters,  using OpenShift API for Data Protection (OADP).

Hybrid cloud enhancements 

Customers choose Red Hat OpenShift due to our approach to hybrid cloud environments, enabling the same operational model whether on-premise or in the public clouds. In this release, we have made significant progress in support for public clouds with VM-friendly networking enhancements through the user-defined tenant network availability for AWS and supporting VMs as tech preview features for hosted on Oracle Cloud (OCI) bare metal. 

You can use OpenShift Virtualization on an OpenShift Container Platform cluster that has been deployed in a logical partition (LPAR) on IBM Z® and IBM® LinuxONE (s390x architecture) systems. For more information, see IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE compatibility.

Improvements to Migration toolkit for virtualization 

Migration toolkit for virtualization (MTV) provides an easy path for customers to move from other virtualization platforms to OpenShift Virtualization. Customers can migrate thousands of VMs with this tool that is included with Red Hat OpenShift. 

Updates for MTV in the OpenShift 4.18 release include:

• The ability for users to provide PersistentVolumeClaim (PVC) names in a migration plan
• Shortened plan durations with scheduler optimizations for cold and warm migrations, making migrations faster
• Migration support for SuSE VMs
• Restructured documentation to ease user experience and navigation 

Based on MTV usage and observation, we have aggregated findings to provide guidance to other migrations. Check out the performance recommendations for both cold and warm migrations on how to successfully carry out a migration plan.  

Supercharge OpenShift Virtualization user productivity with Openshift Lightspeed 

OpenShift Lightspeed is a generative AI-based chat assistant integrated into OpenShift UI, enabled through the OpenShift Lightspeed operator. The chat assistant has built-in knowledge of OpenShift product documentation, including virtualization and the virtualization runbook. Customers can use OpenShift Lightspeed to ask questions about OpenShift Virtualization, including product inquiries, "how-to" guidance and troubleshooting. Additionally, OpenShift Lightspeed is VM-aware—when the chat assistant is opened on a VM, users can seamlessly import YAML, logs and events from it.

Use case 1 : OpenShift virtualization product knowledge 

Use case 2: Simplified troubleshooting by one-click import of YAML, events and logs in OpenShift Lightspeed.

Partner growth 

Rubrik is now supported with OpenShift Virtualization

Rubrik  now supports OpenShift Virtualization. Organizations can more easily migrate and protect VMs and other applications running on OpenShift. Rubrik Security Cloud simplifies cyber resilience through enhanced security, providing faster data recovery and improving the reliability of your overall IT infrastructure. Read about the announcement, explore Rubrik with this hands-on walk through and tune in on March 26th at 10:00am PST to watch a live webinar on: Building Cyber Resilience for OpenShift VMs. 

With recent success with building our ecosystem integrations, we have kicked off a white glove initiative to help partners validate their workloads on OpenShift Virtualization which is gaining momentum.

TEKSystem Global Services and AWS partner together to create digital transformation and modernization strategies for customers. 

TEKsystems Global Services recently worked with Red Hat and AWS to migrate workloads to OpenShift Virtualization on Red Hat OpenShift Service with AWS. “Instead of looking at simply migrating from one virtualization platform to another, we collectively saw this as an opportunity for additional transformation and modernization,” said Mike Robinson, Red Hat Partner Sales Manager, TEKsystems Global Services. Read about how TEKsystems and AWS were able to provide a more strategic solution through AWS’s three-phase migration and AWS’s Migration Acceleration Program. 

Learn more about our certified partner solutions. 

Customer adoption 

OpenShift Virtualization is gaining momentum with customers as a viable alternative for both migration and modernization of VM workloads.

Customer adoption is strong and we are seeing several large enterprises making OpenShift and OpenShift  Virtualization their standard for private clouds. Expect to hear more about this at Red Hat Summit.

Read about OpenShift Virtualization from a customer’s perspective: MultiChoice 

MultiChoice, a leading entertainment platform that provides live TV, streaming and subscription services to millions of households in South Africa, chose to modernize their infrastructure with OpenShift Virtualization. MultiChoice migrated their VMs using the Red Hat migration toolkit for virtualization and started establishing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to shift towards DevOps. Download the case study to learn more. 

Become a certified specialist

As with other Red Hat platforms, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and OpenShift, modernizing your infrastructure and operations is a skill set that is valuable for both your company and your 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 Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project that users and vendors are adopting to integrate VMs in Kubernetes. We are also seeing additional companies choosing KubeVirt as a proven key technology. 

Explore the upstream innovation from the KubeVirt 2024 Summit.