Why migrate virtual machines to Red Hat?

A virtual machine (VM) is a computing environment that functions as an isolated system with its own operating system, central processing unit (CPU), memory, network interface, and storage, created on a physical hardware system. VM migration refers to the transfer of a virtual machine from one platform to another.

The decision to migrate your virtual machines isn’t just about infrastructure. It’s about what your infrastructure can (or can’t) do to support the technologies you want to deploy. As businesses embrace automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and cloud-native architectures, virtualization administrators must adapt to these changes and address challenges such as:

Barriers to innovation and modernization
Existing virtualization platforms have limited ability to support application modernization. This can restrict you from keeping up with advances in cloud computing, AI, and cloud-native development.

Increasing costs 
Maintaining legacy virtualization applications in virtual machines is getting more expensive.

Slow application deployment
Manually deploying virtual machines is an inefficient, error-prone process that can result in inconsistent configurations, long deployment times, and an increased risk of security vulnerabilities.

Supporting multiple platforms
Accounting for differences in deployment and management processes and tools across multiple platforms creates unnecessary complexity and confusion. 

15 reasons to adopt OpenShift Virtualization

Whether you have virtual workloads, containerized workloads, or a mix of both, Red Hat® OpenShift® Virtualization provides tools to build, operate, and scale with confidence—all from 1 platform.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, a feature included in Red Hat OpenShift, allows for easy migration by bringing virtual machines into containerized workflows. By running a virtual machine within a container, you can deploy and manage virtual machines side by side with containers. This lets you continue benefiting from your existing virtualization investments while taking advantage of the simplicity and speed of a modern application platform.

With OpenShift Virtualization, you can:

Modernize on your own terms
Moving your VMs to OpenShift Virtualization lets you keep the application components that are critical to your business, while giving you the flexibility to modernize workloads and skills over time.

Reduce operational costs
Migrating your VMs can reduce costs. When you save on infrastructure, you can invest those funds in advanced application-development technologies like hybrid cloud, containers, AI/ML, and automation.

Want help establishing a plan to lower costs and speed up innovation? Take the Virtualization Migration Assessment by Red Hat Consulting.

Increase developer productivity
The self-service capabilities of OpenShift Virtualization let your developers rapidly and reliably deploy preapproved, security-compliant virtual-machine configurations anytime―without opening an IT service ticket. This means developers can build, test, and deploy workloads faster, so applications get to market sooner.

Simplify management
OpenShift Virtualization simplifies operations with a single platform for VMs, containers, and serverless workloads. As a result, you can standardize infrastructure deployment and maintain all workloads using a common, consistent set of established, enterprise tools.

Innovate fearlessly with KubeVirt
OpenShift Virtualization uses open source technology maintained and developed under the KubeVirt project. Building your virtual infrastructure on open source technology gives you complete control over the entire configuration and everything that relies on it. This allows your applications and services to just work—regardless of where they are or what’s supporting them.

In addition to creating virtual machines, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization lets you import existing VMs from other environments via the migration toolkit for virtualization. The toolkit automates the process of mass migration to a new hypervisor. It works by adding new objects to your Red Hat OpenShift cluster via custom resources to enable virtualization tasks. These tasks include:

• Creating and managing Linux® and Windows VMs.
• Connecting to VMs through user-interface and command-line-interface (CLI)  tools.
• Importing and cloning existing VMs, including Red Hat Virtualization VMs.
• Managing network interface controllers and storage disks attached to VMs.
• Live-migrating VMs between nodes.

Migrations are performed in a few simple steps:

1. Provide source and destination credentials.
2. Map the source and destination infrastructure, and create a choreographed plan.
3. Execute the migration effort. 

Live migration—moving a running virtual machine to another host without interrupting the workload—is crucial for maintaining continuous operations as infrastructure demands change. A virtualization platform that lets you configure, initiate, monitor, and cancel live migrations across your environment helps balance workloads and avoid downtime during maintenance activities.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization supports complete live-migration workflows with a unified management console, configurable policies, virtual-machine metrics, and traffic encryption to help keep your applications running reliably.

Successfully planning, deploying, and maintaining a virtualized environment requires specialized skills and knowledge. Expert support and guidance can help you optimally configure your environment, proactively resolve potential issues, and maximize performance, security, and reliability.

Red Hat Consulting documents your existing infrastructure, workloads, and unique migration strategy, then offers software and support for every enterprise IT need.

Deploying an infrastructure built on our open source technologies can simplify your IT configuration while letting you do what you want with (or without) any software, vendor, or product. Some vendors’ technologies are engineered by different companies with different cost centers, application programming interfaces (APIs), and support teams. At Red Hat, we develop products together to improve the interdependencies between the core technologies:

• OpenShift Virtualization uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), which has been part of the mainline Linux kernel since 2007. This means all the stability, consistency, and compatibility of Linux is shared with the virtual layer.
• Everything shares common APIs and management tools, which helps connect systems, share information, and unify management.

With multiple tiers of support, Red Hat can help you keep your IT operations up and running—and if an issue arises, quickly restore services—as you scale and deploy critical applications and workloads.

Red Hat’s trusted products and partner ecosystem come together in 1 comprehensive virtualization solution. Migrate your virtual machines now to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, a modern application platform–based on the open source projects KVM and Kubevirt–that can run virtual machines and containers side by side. The included migration toolkit for virtualization provides the tools you need to start your migration in a few simple steps.  Use automation to accelerate delivery with Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform–from migration at scale to Day 2 operations and remediation. Monitor the security and performance of your VMs from a single console with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. With additional support options and partner integrations for storage, backup and disaster recovery, and networking, you can rely on Red Hat to keep your virtual infrastructure running smoothly throughout the hybrid cloud–and help you modernize when you’re ready.