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Simplify your VM migration to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

November 5, 2026•
Resource type: Overview
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The virtualization industry is in flux

Industry shifts and soaring subscription costs have triggered a wave of active virtual machine (VM) migrations. Organizations across the globe have already moved from conventional hypervisors to Red Hat® OpenShift® Virtualization.  

To ease the burden of this transition, Red Hat Services helps organizations across global banking, government, telecommunications, healthcare, and logistics migrate their enterprise VM estates. By consolidating VMs and containers onto a single platform, teams reduce costs while gaining native continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, automated operations, and modern developer tools to increase software delivery velocity and accelerate application modernization. 

To help organizations accelerate their migration and realize value more quickly, Red Hat offers a comprehensive suite of services—from consulting to training and certification to technical guidance—that supports the entire migration.

Red Hat Consulting offers a quick path to migration

Through hands-on guidance and a mentor-based approach, Red Hat Consulting helps organizations get the most out of their Red Hat technology investment. By applying insights and lessons from previous engagements, our teams have refined their framework so organizations can migrate more VMs faster and with predictable results. 

To help organizations mitigate risk while exiting their current virtualization solution and migrating their VMs to a modern platform, Red Hat Consulting offers customized support that addresses every step of the VM migration.

Red Hat Consulting can help organizations migrate to OpenShift Virtualization through services across 2 distinct phases:

1. Establish a strategy

Migrations begin with a 2-week Virtualization Migration Assessment, where Red Hat consultants work with teams to create a strategic plan for the VM migration that reduces downtime and mitigates risk. 

The Virtualization Migration Assessment is a highly collaborative experience where teams work side by side with Red Hat consultants, documenting current and desired states to achieve business and operational goals. Through a series of workshops and whiteboarding sessions with platform teams, Red Hat consultants:

  • Analyze current VM infrastructure (including compute, network, and storage). 
  • Identify VM workloads; define integrations; and categorize VMs by operating system, dependencies, and security profiles. 
  • Plan for Day 2 operations, including automation, configuration management, monitoring, and backups.
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Why Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization:

Next, Red Hat Consulting provides a tailored, high-level solution design (HLD) document for the target virtualization environment with a customized implementation plan for migrating VMs. The HLD includes strategies for management, monitoring, risk mitigation, and disaster recovery, as well as a security-focused approach and timeline for VM migration. 

At the end of this phase, Red Hat Consulting provides recommendations and strategic advice, including:

  • A clear and strategic roadmap for migration.
  • A path to retirement of the current VM platform.
  • Critical application dependencies to prevent business disruptions.
  • Customized training opportunities.
  • A total cost for the complete migration.

2. Complete the platform build and scale migration 

Ahead of the migration, consultants build out the Red Hat Consulting: Virtualization Migration Factory on Red Hat OpenShift. The factory lays the foundation to migrate the VM estate at scale, reducing time, cost, and risk. Once the migration factory is deployed, initial VM workloads are migrated, validating Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and the migration strategy in the environment. After the initial wave of VMs has been successfully migrated, the focus shifts to adopting automation to safely speed up migration and strengthen the security and stability of the platform.

To ensure both readiness before production migration waves begin and long-term success with the new virtualization platform, Red Hat recommends virtualization team training, available through self-paced courses or a customized private bootcamp. Early enablement helps organizations confidently migrate, manage, and create VMs on Red Hat OpenShift. It also provides strategies to connect VMs on Red Hat OpenShift to datacenter services outside of a Red Hat OpenShift cluster and offers ample architectures to manage high availability of VMs using standard Kubernetes features and extensions from OpenShift Virtualization.

By the end of the production build and initial migration phase, organizations will see benefits that include:

  • Reduced complexity, with a unified platform for all workloads.
  • Preservation of existing virtualization investments.
  • Consistent VM workloads, reliable production, and efficient operations.
  • Deployment of OpenShift Virtualization with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform, migration toolkit for virtualization, and GitOps.
  • The flexibility to modernize applications and infrastructure when ready.
  • Automated, compliant platform controls and validated application performance before full deployment in a production environment.

With the platform build established, the engagement transitions into full-scale migration waves. The optional Technical Account Manager (TAM) establishes direct engineering alignment and proactive support before execution accelerates. With the support of Red Hat Services, organizations execute enterprise-wide migration waves and safely retire the previous virtualization platform. Through the migration, Red Hat consultants work with teams to:

  • Automate the migration of batched VMs using Ansible Automation Platform.
  • Automate the configuration of components (including networking and storage).
  • Execute structured, repeatable migration waves across remaining workloads.
  • Support migration validation, knowledge transfer, and operational handoff. 
  • Safely retire previous hypervisor platforms.

With Red Red Hat Services’ extensive experience and success in enterprise virtualization migrations, organizations have a smart migration model that reduces complexity, mitigates risk, protects application quality, and lowers operational costs.

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Why work with Red Hat Consulting:

  • Proven experience: Hundreds of virtualization assessments completed.
  • Critical industries: Successfully migrated enterprise VM estates for global banks, telecommunications, healthcare logistics, and technology. 
  • Enterprise scale: Trusted by industry leaders to execute critical migrations with minimal downtime.

Read about how NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used Red Hat Learning Subscription to train its team and migrated 2,400 VMs to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.2

Learn about how Emirates NBD worked with Red Hat Consulting to migrate more than 9,000 VMs to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.3

Innovate as business needs evolve

Once VM workloads are successfully migrated to Red Hat OpenShift, organizations have a solid foundation to innovate at their own pace. The new platform provides the flexibility to not only run VMs, but also expand into true application modernization, harden platform security, and simplify software delivery at a pace that fits business needs. Organizations can build upon their foundational virtualization capabilities to:

  • Support Day 2 operations: Optimize configuration management and use Ansible Automation Platform to further implement automation to help reduce time-consuming manual processes.
  • Deliver software faster: Modernize traditional applications over time using cloud-native tools, microservices, and CI/CD pipelines integrated directly into Red Hat OpenShift.
  • Safeguard trusted software supply chains: Integrate automated compliance checks, provenance tracking, and security controls directly into CI/CD pipelines to protect workloads against emerging vulnerabilities.

The Red Hat difference

Red Hat experts can collaborate with teams to accelerate migration success and help organizations make the most of OpenShift Virtualization through 3 distinct service offerings:

Red Hat Consulting

By unifying existing virtual machines and cloud-native containers onto a single platform, Red Hat Consulting helps eliminate isolated operations, lower total cost of ownership, and establish a foundation for rapid feature deployment—all without disruption to end customers. Build automation playbooks to execute wave-based migrations that safeguard application performance and meet customer service-level agreements (SLAs). 

Red Hat Training and Certification

Red Hat Training and Certification offers a suite of expert-created courses that equip organizations and individuals with the knowledge and expertise needed to successfully use Red Hat technologies—including OpenShift Virtualization. Choose from flexible, role-based self-paced courses or customizable private bootcamps tailored to organizational needs. Bootcamps include exam retakes and a no-cost, 1-year Red Hat Learning Subscription to support continual skill building. 

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Discover how Johnson Controls partnered with Red Hat Consulting to accelerate and simplify their migration to OpenShift Virtualization.4

Red Hat Technical Account Management

Red Hat Technical Account Managers (TAMs) are technical experts who serve as single points of contact for technical advice and ongoing support. TAMs have specialized knowledge of Red Hat products and provide proactive health checks, escalation support, and a direct line to Red Hat engineering.

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Red Hat-certified new hires reach full productivity 46% faster than non-certified new hires.5

Kickstart your VM migration

Organizations looking to accelerate their exit from existing virtualization solutions and safely and efficiently migrate VMs to a trusted platform should start with a Virtualization Migration Assessment. Speak to a Red Hatter to learn more about the benefits and how to get started.

*Limited-time migration promotion. Available on qualifying deals signed by Dec. 31, 2026.

  1. Red Hat press release. “Red Hat Recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Server Virtualization Platforms.” 16 Sept. 2026.

    Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization, by Tony Harvey, Daniel Bowers, Paul Delory, Tony Iams, Owen Marino, 14 September 2026. Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

  2. Red Hat case study. “Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.” 30 June 2026. 

  3. Red Hat case study. “Emirates NBD gains efficiency by unifying virtual machines, containers, and AI with Red Hat”. 4 May 2026.

  4. Red Hat case study.  “Johnson Controls Modernizes Security and Access with Hybrid Cloud Foundation Powered by Red Hat” 20 May 2025.

  5. IDC White Paper sponsored by Red Hat, The Business Value of Red Hat Training and Certification, Doc #US54623226-BVWP, June 2026. 

Tags:Application modernization, Virtualization