Migrating VMs? 15 key resources to deepen your OpenShift Virtualization knowledge

28 octobre 2024Deb Richardson6 minutes (temps de lecture)

Recent industry shifts have found many organizations having to reevaluate their traditional virtualization strategies to look for more modern, cloud-native solutions. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization—built on the kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) and Kubevirt upstream projects—is an included feature of Red Hat OpenShift that helps you migrate and deploy new and existing virtual machine (VM) workloads alongside containers on the same unified platform. Additionally, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can help speed migration processes and automate Day 1 and Day 2 operations.

OpenShift Virtualization training and certification

If you're looking for a more modern VM solution but you're still not sure if OpenShift Virtualization is right for your organization, here are 15 resources to help you decide.

New OpenShift Virtualization migration assessment

The OpenShift Virtualization migration assessment is designed to help you understand, plan and create a strategic path forward for your VM infrastructure migration. Here, you can work directly with Red Hat Consulting to build a clear roadmap and timeline for migrating your VMs from traditional virtualization platforms to OpenShift Virtualization.

When you engage in a migration assessment, your networking, platform, and security teams participate in workshops guided by experienced Red Hat architects. You'll assess your current environment, develop a set of goals for your VM migration, and then gather requirements to get you from here to there. Your team will work with Red Hat consultants to understand and analyze your infrastructure and workloads and come away with a concrete and achievable migration plan.

Learn more about the migration assessment

5 new learning paths

Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned expert, these learning resources can help you get started, refresh your knowledge, or help you convince others that OpenShift Virtualization is worth a try. Here are 5 recent learning paths focusing on OpenShift Virtualization.

1. Getting started with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Having the ability to run VMs within a container and on a single platform can simplify management tasks and reduce time to production. Using OpenShift Virtualization allows administrators to incorporate VM management into their containerized workflows without having to drastically alter their existing infrastructure.

This learning path walks you through the steps needed to configure OpenShift Virtualization, deploy new virtual machines and import existing VMs to a new environment.

Start the learning path here

2. Learning OpenShift Virtualization concepts as a vSphere admin

OpenShift Virtualization's ability to run and deploy new and existing VMs alongside containers on a single platform allows your organization to migrate from an older traditional virtualization system to a more modern, cloud-native solution.

In this learning path, you explore high-level OpenShift Virtualization concepts such as network configurations, storage paradigms, disaster recovery, and how to navigate those coming from a traditional virtualization platform.

Start the learning path here

3. OpenShift Virtualization and application modernization using the Developer Sandbox

This learning path walks you through creating a VM on the Developer Sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift. You'll install an application in a VM, expose the application with OpenShift networking, and then recreate that application as a container. This gives you hands-on experience with managing a VM using OpenShift, and shows you how simple it can be.

Start the learning path here

4. Windows failover clustering in Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization using SCSI-3 persistent reservations

The Microsoft Windows Server family of operating systems comes with the ability to set up clustered storage. This learning path walks you through how to do this while running a Windows VM in an OpenShift cluster using the OpenShift Virtualization operator. You'll also learn how to set up failover clustering for storage in your Windows Server VM.

Start the learning path here

5. How to create and scale 6,000 virtual machines in 7 hours with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

In the world of organizational infrastructure, sometimes there’s an urgent need to rapidly scale up. Organizations may have a limited amount of time to stand up new infrastructure, a problem which is compounded by the size of the services in question.

In this learning path, we explore a large-scale deployment scenario enabling 6,000 VMs and 15,000 pods. This involves an external Red Hat Ceph Storage 12-node cluster and an OpenShift Virtualization 132 node cluster, integrated with an external Ceph Storage cluster.

Start the learning path here

9 recent articles and blogs

Need more information? The Red Hat Blog has been publishing a slew of OpenShift Virtualization articles lately. You can find even more on our dedicated Red Hat Blog Virtualization channel.

1. Why choose Red Hat for virtualization?

In this article, you learn why you should migrate and modernize your VM workloads and how Red Hat can help. VM migration and modernization can help:

Reduce costs
Speed innovation
Simplify management
Enable cloud-native application development, and
Facilitate AI integration
…and more

Red Hat's product offerings can help with all of these, including OpenShift, Ansible Automation Platform, and OpenShift Virtualization.

Learn more here

2. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization: FAQs from the field

Discussions about OpenShift Virtualization generally follow a common pattern where users ask a number of questions after getting a high level understanding of what's involved. Once those questions are answered, they often want to see OpenShift Virtualization in action through demos and hands-on workshops.

This article answers common questions that Red Hatters have been asked in the field, followed by a number of demo videos to explore some concepts in more depth. This can help set expectations, and provide clarity, about what OpenShift Virtualization can (and can't!) do.

Read the FAQs here

3. Reaching escape velocity for OpenShift Virtualization

Red Hat's involvement with virtualization technologies isn't new. Red Hat started with virtualization in the early 2000s and continues today. In this article, you learn about that history, including our involvement with kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) development, the KubeVirt project, and the introduction of OpenShift Virtualization in 2020. Finally, the article talks about the current state of, and planned future for, OpenShift Virtualization.

Learn more here

4. Reducing complexity in virtual machine migration and in application platform management

Migrating from traditional virtualization platforms and modernizing your virtualization infrastructure requires careful planning and a deliberate approach. In this article, you learn how Red Hat's open virtualization infrastructure can simplify and speed up migration projects, reducing both the potential disruptions to your business and the overall costs involved.

Isolate and mitigate migration risks
Automate and orchestrate migration at scale, and
Safeguard operations for business continuity

The article wraps up with links to an interactive migration demo and a detailed virtualization migration solution architecture.

Read the article here

5. OpenShift Virtualization: Not as scary as it seems

If you're wondering exactly what OpenShift Virtualization is all about, then this is a great place to start. This article explains how OpenShift Virtualization works, including how to install the OpenShift Virtualization operator. It explains how QEMU, KVM, and libvert interact with each other, how they work inside containers, and how a VM can still be accessed, migrated, and load-balanced just like microservices. In the second half of the article, you learn how to use OpenShift Virtualization, including a step-by-step walkthrough of installation, creating a new VM, and creating templates.

Read the article here

6. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization: Configuring virtual machines to use external networks

The networking architecture of OpenShift provides a robust and scalable front end for containerized applications. Services provide simple load balancing based on pod tags. Routes expose those services to the external network. While these concepts work well for microservices, they can prove challenging for applications running in a VM on OpenShift Virtualization, where existing server management infrastructure is already in place and assumes that full access to a VM is always available.

This article discusses different options for configuring your OpenShift Virtualization cluster to allow your VMs to access the external network in ways similar to other popular hypervisors.

Read the article here

7. Preparing virtual machine networking for migration from vSphere to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Migrating a VM from one hypervisor to another can be challenging. You have to install the platform, configure the network and other infrastructure components, and that's before you tackle the challenges involving the VM itself!

This article discusses some of the ways you can smoothly transition the network configuration of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) VM from traditional virtualization platforms to OpenShift Virtualization.

Read the article here

8. Migrating virtual machines from vSphere to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with the migration toolkit for virtualization

Red Hat migration toolkit for virtualization is an OpenShift operator that enables VM migration at scale. Migration toolkit for virtualization helps your organization quickly and easily migrate VM workloads from traditional virtualization platforms. Once your VMs are migrated to OpenShift Virtualization, you can reclaim the old hypervisor infrastructure and begin the process of containerizing the workloads that run in the VMs—all on the same unified, modern, cloud-native platform.

This article guides you through the steps required to install migration toolkit for virtualization and configure it for VM migration, and then demonstrates the migration process in clear and concise terms.

Read the article here

9. Ansible Automation Platform for OpenShift Virtualization in a multi-cluster environment

As more and more organizations are adopting OpenShift Virtualization, we've been seeing an increased need to automate VM Day 1 and Day 2 operations. A centralized Ansible Automation Platform model within the hub cluster enables automation across OpenShift clusters spanning multiple zones, data centers, and clouds.

This article demonstrates how to configure Ansible Automation Platform to communicate with a remote OpenShift cluster to manage VMs. This communication enables Ansible Automation Platform to:

Create a VM on remote cluster
Perform post-provisioning tasks like installing necessary packages and starting services via container groups
Set up network resources for reachability

This model can be extended to orchestrate the deployment of complex, multi-VM applications with complex components spanning multiple OpenShift clusters.

Read the article here