Red Hat OpenShift expands support for VMware vSphere Foundation 9 and VMware Cloud Foundation 9

General availability (GA) support is now available for Red Hat OpenShift versions 4.18, 4.19, and 4.20 running on VMware vSphere Foundation 9 (VVF9) and VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF9).

As organizations continue to modernize their infrastructure, Red Hat remains committed to providing a stable, certified, and high-performance foundation for Kubernetes workloads across diverse environments. This announcement means that all current Red Hat customers deploying OpenShift on vSphere 8/vCenter 8 or VCF 5 can run their workloads on OpenShift clusters deployed on VVF9 or VCF9 as an infrastructure provider.

With the introduction of VCF9, Broadcom has evolved its strategy to offer a comprehensive, all-in-one product suite. Red Hat has aligned its support to integrate with this new architecture.

Customers deploying OpenShift clusters on top of VCF9 will use a standardized networking model:

• Infrastructure network provider: Powered by VMware NSX, helping to ensure robust connectivity at the hypervisor level.
• Overlay network: Powered by OVN-Kubernetes, providing the standard, agile networking layer required by OpenShift.

For NSX Container Network Interface (CNI) integration, Red Hat uses the Partner certification process (see Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog) to verify partner components are verified for compatibility with Red Hat products, maintaining the stability and security that our customers expect.

To support the full lifecycle of your applications, we are also updating our management and storage compatibility for the VVF9 and VCF9 platforms.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes (ACM) 2.15.1+ supports both VVF9 and VCF9. This allows operations teams to manage their OpenShift fleet across these new VMware environments with the same governance, visibility, and control they use today.

For customers utilizing OpenShift Data Foundation versions 4.19.7 and 4.20 are available as a Technology Preview (TP) on VVF9 and VCF9. 

Looking ahead

We plan to make ODF versions 4.18, 4.19, and 4.20 generally available on these platforms in Q1 2026. This roadmap ensures that customers can begin testing and validating their storage architectures today while preparing for full production support early next year.

We recognize that migration is a key concern for our customers. Therefore, in 2026, Red Hat plans to develop and publish recommended migration guidance to assist customers transition their OpenShift from vSphere 8/vCenter 8 and VCF 5 to VVF9 and VCF9 platforms.

Red Hat values the real-world experiences of our customer base. As you begin to deploy and operate OpenShift on VVF9 or VCF9, we encourage you to share your feedback with your account manager. Your insights are instrumental in helping us refine our integrations and better support your hybrid cloud journey.