15 reasons to adopt Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

For more than 2 decades, organizations have relied on virtualization technologies to deliver innovative applications and services that improve operations, optimize costs, and promote new business opportunities. The introduction of virtual machines (VMs) into datacenters helped IT teams efficiently use resources, improve flexibility, and optimize infrastructure performance. As public cloud resources became more accessible, virtualization platforms evolved to make use of the scalability, agility, and potential cost benefits offered by new cloud computing models. Today, rising costs, licensing uncertainty, and renewal pressure are forcing IT leaders to reconsider decisions once considered stable and long-term.

As part of this virtualization reassessment, many organizations are seeking the right combination of consistency, efficiency, and support for their future operations and cloud-based applications. These organizations want to quickly migrate to a unified, cost-effective platform that prepares them for IT modernization, while continuing to manage the existing VMs that handle the bulk of their workloads. At a typical midsize-to-large enterprise in a mature market, approximately 75% to 85% of on-premise x86 server workloads still run on VMs, according to Gartner®.¹ 

Application platforms that combine support for both traditional VMs and lightweight technologies like containers are of particular interest for organizations that want to get ahead. Teams can readily migrate their current VMs to the new platform and run them alongside container-based applications to take advantage of new approaches to building and deploying applications. At the same time, container orchestration platforms often include tools and automation that help IT teams simplify application lifecycle management across massive hybrid cloud environments. IT teams can deploy and administer their existing workloads—virtualized or containerized—using common processes and tools while taking advantage of innovation in monitoring, development and deployment pipelines, GitOps, service meshes, and serverless technologies. As a result, organizations can continue to run the virtualized workloads their business relies on while modernizing their applications and approaches at their own pace. 

To be successful, IT organizations need a cloud-ready application foundation that meets their current virtualization needs while preparing them for future modernization and change. Red Hat® OpenShift® provides a modern, enterprise-ready infrastructure platform for running VMs and container-based applications. Powered by containers, Kubernetes, and DevSecOps capabilities, Red Hat OpenShift is a foundation for rapidly building, deploying, running, and managing both traditional and modern applications at scale and with security across hybrid, multicloud, and edge environments.

Included as a feature of Red Hat OpenShift and based on the established Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor and KubeVirt open source projects, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization helps your organization migrate its Linux® and Microsoft Windows VMs to a unified application platform. By moving VMs from other platforms and running them on Red Hat OpenShift, your team can get the most from existing virtualization investments while taking advantage of cloud-native architectures, streamlined operations and management, and new development approaches. Migrating VMs to Red Hat OpenShift delivers the first tier of modernization, platform modernization. From there, your IT team can incrementally take on operational and application modernization if desired.

Red Hat also offers consulting services to help your organization migrate more quickly and effectively. Our experts help get the process started² by assessing your organization’s business goals and current state and planning a path forward through a series of interactive workshops. In fact, Red Hat Consulting sped the adoption of and migration to Red Hat OpenShift by 46% versus DIY implementations.³

4. Operate consistently across hybrid and multicloud environments

One of the key advantages of adopting hybrid and multicloud environments is flexibility. During application deployment, these environments let you choose between various datacenter and cloud resources to balance scalability, performance, and cost according to your business objectives. Application platforms that run and migrate VM workloads consistently across hybrid and multicloud environments can help you simplify application deployment, optimize resource use, and maintain operational consistency.

OpenShift Virtualization supports self-managed physical servers in datacenters, edge environments, and public cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. This choice offers the optimal infrastructure for your organization’s VMs. It’s also available as part of Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS—a fully managed cloud service to offload ongoing platform management and help you get started in less time.

5. Provide self-service options for deploying VMs

Manually deploying VMs is an inefficient, error-prone process that can result in inconsistent configurations, long deployment times, and an increased risk of security vulnerabilities. Self-service capabilities let users rapidly and reliably deploy preapproved, security-compliant VM configurations when they need them and without opening an IT service ticket.

Following standard Red Hat OpenShift roles, users can create VMs in their projects—and then grant access to other project members—to help their entire team quickly get the resources they need. VM instance types simplify self-service provisioning via predefined operating system images, workload types, and hardware requirements. You can also use templates to deploy VMs that require advanced configuration, including virtual appliances.

12. Back up and restore VMs

When unexpected events or system disruptions occur, backup and restore capabilities can help your team recover VMs in less time, ensuring continued operations. Creating frequent backups—representations of the state and data of a VM at a specific point in time—provides the information needed to restore existing VMs. 

OpenShift Virtualization lets you back up VMs automatically on demand or on fixed schedules, manage saved images, and restore workloads quickly to minimize the impact of disruptions on your business. Red Hat’s certified partner ecosystem also includes third-party products for data storage, backup, and restoration. Using the Operator Framework, your platform can interact with many of these products directly from Red Hat OpenShift. For example, your team can install and configure Ansible Automation Platform via an operator, and then use the platform to automate VM lifecycle management, including backup and restore operations.

13. Scale infrastructure as workloads change

Dynamic workloads, diverse technologies, and rapid pace of development and deployment associated with modern applications place high demands on IT infrastructure. To ensure optimal performance and resource use, virtualization platforms must dynamically and efficiently scale up and down as workloads change.

Machine management features in OpenShift Virtualization, including autoscaling based on workload policies and machine health checks, can help your team administer infrastructure with greater flexibility and efficiency to meet modern application demands. 

14. Support a collaborative, open source model

Open source development models promote collaboration, innovation, and community-driven development to rapidly deliver new, advanced virtualization technologies. With access to stable community innovation, open standards for broad compatibility, and open application programming interfaces (APIs) for flexible integration, open source technologies can help your organization build efficient virtualized environments across datacenter and cloud infrastructures.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization uses the proven KVM hypervisor, a widely adopted and trusted virtualization technology used by leading global companies. KVM provides the underlying virtualization capabilities, while Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization uses KubeVirt, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project, to extend Red Hat OpenShift and support container-native virtualization. KubeVirt provides a unified development platform where developers can build, modify, and deploy applications residing in both containers and VMs in a common, shared environment.

15. Work with our virtualization experts

Successfully planning, deploying, and maintaining a virtualized environment requires specialized skills and knowledge. Expert support and guidance, backed by extensive virtualization experience and in-depth platform knowledge, can help configure your environment, proactively resolve potential issues, and maximize performance, security, and reliability.

With multiple tiers of support designed to meet your organization’s needs, Red Hat can help keep your IT operations up and running. And if an issue arises, Red Hat experts can help your team quickly restore services, as you innovate, scale, and deploy critical applications and workloads.

You can also take advantage of Red Hat services, consulting engagements⁶, and training and certification curricula⁷ to gain container and Kubernetes skills and experience. To prepare teams for success, Red Hat Consulting works with your organization to generate a roadmap for VM migration that includes strategies for management, monitoring, risk mitigation, and disaster recovery, all using a security-focused approach and best practices.

Deploy a consistent foundation for innovation

By giving you a single scalable and flexible platform for VMs and containers, OpenShift Virtualization reduces operational overhead and opens a straightforward path to modernization. This integration offers a unified approach to managing VMs and containers in an efficient, security-focused manner. 

You can also apply modern application development principles to your VMs and run all of your applications and workloads consistently across on-site datacenter, edge, and cloud environments. Increase developer productivity, simplify operations, and streamline infrastructure and application delivery to better support your business. With OpenShift Virtualization, you can meet today’s needs while building a foundation for tomorrow’s, without another disruptive migration. 

To maintain its market-leading position against competition from start-ups and global retailers, Turkish classified listing and e-commerce platform sahibinden.com decided to modernize its IT infrastructure and work approaches.

The company began a 3-phase project to migrate its existing VMs into container workflows with Red Hat OpenShift, running in a private cloud environment across its two datacenters. As part of its shift to containers, sahibinden.com adopted an active-active datacenter configuration, where both datacenters share workloads within the private cloud environment. New and refactored container-based applications are deployed across multiple Red Hat OpenShift® nodes.

With this new architecture and DevOps workflows, sahibinden.com has decreased system reliability incidents by 97%, improved developer productivity and time to market, and enhanced its reputation for technology innovation.

Unify and streamline IT operations with a single, enterprise-ready application platform for both VMs and containers.

OpenShift Virtualization reduces operational complexity by providing a unified, modern, cloud-native infrastructure for all of your virtualized and containerized applications and workloads. Plan your path to modernization with a platform that brings modern application development principles to existing VMs and prepares your organization for a cloud-native future.

Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Explore OpenShift Virtualization for yourself

Explore the interactive demos of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization for step-by-step guidance on the fundamentals of using the virtualization solution. 

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Need help getting started?

For many organizations, virtualization migration is uncharted territory. Most have built their virtual estates over years or decades and have rarely had cause to move them at scale. They, and may lack the in-house knowledge, capacity, or specialist resources to plan and execute a project of this size. Red Hat's consulting services team is well-versed in helping customers navigate and deliver on these migrations.

Assess and plan your VM migration

Red Hat Virtualization Migration Assessment is an experience-driven framework that helps organizations understand, plan, and create a strategic path forward for VM infrastructure migrations. This engagement from Red Hat Consulting provides a clear roadmap and timeline for migrating your VMs off your traditional virtualization platform. 

Learn more about Virtualization Migration Assessment