Simplifying virtual machine management in financial services

Financial services organizations are under significant pressure to maintain secure, compliant, and high-performing IT environments, often managing thousands of virtual machines (VMs) across diverse settings. More and more of these institutions are turning to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to reduce licensing costs and admin tasks, integrating VMs with containerized workloads on a unified platform, enhancing efficiency and manageability. The platform helps migrate VMs smoothly from any previous hypervisor, with built-in automation and scalability to support tens of thousands of VMs. Red Hat Consulting has been further streamlining this transition, helping organizations take advantage of additional Red Hat solutions, such as Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation, to optimize operations and storage. Together, these solutions empower financial services firms to boost efficiency, control costs, and build an IT infrastructure ready for the future.

Benefits

• Cut licensing costs and admin tasks by migrating VMs to same platform container workloads are hosted
• Reduced IT management time with a unified approach
• Safeguarded application performance and security
• Enhanced scalability with a future-proof solution

Financial services institutions’ IT departments face immense pressure. They must uphold exceptional levels of security, comply with numerous regulations, and deliver great user experiences, yet, at the same time, manage licensing costs to ensure the deployment and management of virtual environments is sustainable.

These institutions manage tens of thousands of VMs, covering a wide range of environments. These range from lower-priority settings, such as development, quality assurance, and capacity planning to highly regulated, secure customer data environments that require 24x7 availability.

At this scale, the choice of hypervisor is crucial. It can significantly impact licensing costs, IT efficiency, and manageability. Financial services firms need a virtualization platform that is cost-effective, intuitive, and supports automated management while avoiding being wholly dependent on a single vendor.

An increasing number of major financial services institutions are adopting open source solutions, including Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. As an extension of Red Hat OpenShift, the platform helps IT administrators to manage, deploy, and schedule VMs using the same tools they use for containerized workloads.

Designed for seamless integration across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments, OpenShift Virtualization provides a consistent management model for traditional virtual machines within a trusted, comprehensive hybrid cloud platform. It is included with Red Hat OpenShift subscriptions and can be activated at no additional cost.

Existing VMs can be easily migrated to this platform using Red Hat’s migration toolkit for virtualization. The toolkit facilitates the migration of virtualized workloads to OpenShift from any previous hypervisor and can operate at any scale — from a single VM for testing to hundreds for production.

With banks successfully migrating services, including development, quality assurance, and capacity planning over to OpenShift Virtualization, there is now greater confidence in the platform and Red Hat’s migration process with production environments in their sights. These are workloads with much more stringent requirements – core banking applications that must be up and running 24x7.

Cut licensing costs and admin tasks by migrating VMs to same platform container workloads are hosted

Banks have significantly reduced core license fees by shifting many workloads to OpenShift Virtualization, which is included with each Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform subscription at no extra cost. With OpenShift, scaling infrastructure is easier than ever. By running Red Hat Enterprise Linux® VMs on OpenShift, organizations can consolidate their needs under a single OpenShift subscription.

In addition, OpenShift Virtualization will support the expansion of banks and financial institutions as they continue to build more data centers and enlarge their private cloud. Eventually, they will see lower expenditures by reducing hardware rental costs, with OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization playing a significant part.

Reduced management time with a unified approach

With all VMs managed within OpenShift Virtualization, financial services organizations can run them alongside their container workloads in a unified manner, supporting a DevOps approach. Using a single platform reduces the effort required for workload tracking, monitoring, and management.

Safeguarded application performance and security

VMs and their applications operate seamlessly in OpenShift Virtualization, with no performance degradation, regardless of the previous hypervisor. Built-in auto-healing, reconciliation features, and other automated capabilities help ensure consistent application performance. OpenShift enforces security policies for VMs, helping IT departments meet their security and compliance requirements.

Enhanced scalability with a future-proof solution

OpenShift Virtualization offers a highly scalable solution for deploying and managing VMs, capable of handling tens of thousands of VMs. With Red Hat’s ongoing commitment to innovation and responsive support, financial services organizations can have confidence that it is a solution fit for the future.

To simplify and accelerate the migration to OpenShift Virtualization, some financial services organizations choose to engage Red Hat Consulting. Red Hat Consulting provides highly skilled and experienced professionals — including architects, technical account managers, and training specialists — to help IT departments get up and running smoothly. In addition to assisting with the migration to OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat consultants can also help IT departments take advantage of additional Red Hat solutions to enhance their DevOps approach. For example, Ansible Automation Platform boosts efficiency by automating operations within and beyond the OpenShift environment, and OpenShift Data Foundation offers integrated software-defined storage for containers.

With Red Hat technologies and services, financial services organizations can maximize efficiency, improve VM management, and maintain application performance levels without excessive licensing costs.