How to migrate VMs from VMware to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

IT organizations seeking to migrate virtual machines (VMs) from VMware vSphere to a VMware alternative, Red Hat® OpenShift® Virtualization, can benefit from using Red Hat’s migration toolkit for virtualization. In addition to supporting VMware migrations, Red Hat technologies can help with VM automation and performance monitoring.

VMs are computing systems that act as isolated environments on a physical hardware system, managed by a hypervisor. One benefit of virtualization is flexibility, including the ability to migrate a VM from 1 platform to another.

Common reasons for migrating VMs include: 

• Changing vendors to take advantage of better pricing.
• Adopting new infrastructure that can better support the technologies you want to deploy.
• Reducing technology sprawl by consolidating your infrastructure into fewer datacenters.

Whatever the reasons, migrations can be complex and time consuming projects. Anyone involved in a VM migration will want to consider tools that simplify, automate, and monitor the many steps involved.

In this article, we’ll look at 3 Red Hat solutions that assist in migrations: 

• The migration toolkit for virtualization
• Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform
• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes

As a companion to the sections below, you can also play 3 interactive walkthroughs to help you visualize these tools in action.

The migration toolkit for virtualization simplifies the process of migrating VMs from VMware vSphere to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. It’s included with your Red Hat OpenShift subscription and available in OpenShift OperatorHub.

A typical VM migration process unfolds like this:

• Log in to vSphere to view your inventory of VMs. You can also review the datastores and network devices each VM uses, which helps with troubleshooting and understanding dependencies within your cluster.
• Next, switch to your Red Hat OpenShift console and ensure you’re logged in to your local cluster. Find the migration section on the left hand side menu, and locate the provider (VMware) and the endpoint (vSphere).
• Create a migration plan, which can include migrating multiple VMs, and name it.
• Review the list of VMs you’ll migrate, and start the migration.
• Once the migration has finished, your VMs will be running on Red Hat OpenShift and can be managed like any other workload. You can check their statuses and view details about each, including CPU, memory, storage, and network. You can connect to your VMs through the console where you can perform common operational tasks such as managing VM snapshots.

Watch the interactive demo

When you need to migrate groups of many VMs, automation can increase efficiency and reduce the risk of errors. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can assist in VM migration by creating repeatable, consistent processes.

A typical series of steps looks like this:

• In VMware vSphere, identify the VMs you wish to migrate.
• In Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, you can open a template configured to migrate VMs. The template includes the inventory―a list of hosts known to the system―and a playbook, which contains the Ansible code for the migration process.
• A template may include a customizable Ansible survey that lets you input the names of the VMs you want to migrate and set things like the provider name, migration plan, and mappings for storage and network.
• Next, launch the job. Switch to your Red Hat OpenShift console to see the migration plan, including the necessary network and storage maps. You’ll see the migration has automatically started without you needing to do anything else.
• Confirm the details of the migration plan in the YAML tab. You can automate as much or as little of the process as you prefer.
• Lastly, check the logs of your migration to see what’s happening and monitor any issues.

Watch the interactive demo

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization provides cross-cluster monitoring of virtual machines workloads in Red Hat OpenShift, including VMs running through Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

These steps outline a basic walkthrough of this service:

• When you log in to your Red Hat OpenShift console, you’ll be taken to the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management view. Here you can access an overview of all your clusters within the dashboard.
• When you switch to a cluster used for virtualization, you can see details about the VMs you’re running, including their statuses and the cluster node on which each is deployed.
• You can also find specific resources such as pods, nodes, and VMs using search queries and filters. This search functionality makes it easier to find what you’re looking for in large, multicluster environments.
• Once you’ve located a VM, you can explore information about it, including creation details, applied labels, and enabled features.
• You can navigate to the YAML tab to view the entire machine configuration as code, which helps when you want to control VMs and their deployments programmatically. You'll also find resources to assist with troubleshooting and understanding dependencies within your cluster.
• You can visually monitor the health, performance, and use of your cluster resources. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management integrates with Grafana for real-time monitoring and dashboards.
• Within your Grafana dashboard, you can perform common tasks on your virtual machines and configure alerts that’ll be sent to your existing monitoring systems. These alerts can help you identify problems and optimize your computing resources.

Watch the interactive demo

Red Hat has long been a contributor to open source virtualization software development. Today, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization allows IT teams to bring VMs onto a modern virtualization platform that provides a clear path for modernization. This approach means organizations can benefit from their existing investments in virtualization while taking advantage of the simplicity and speed of a modern application platform.

With Red Hat’s migration toolkit for virtualization, you can move your VMs to a new platform with minimal downtime. We can help you evaluate the health of your virtual machines, identify critical workloads, and make a migration plan. 

You can automate the migration process with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and rely on Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization to streamline maintenance of the entire VM lifecycle―all from a single console that tracks and reports issues, and across private and public cloud locations, including the edge.