At industry turning point, Red Hat named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Server Virtualization Platforms

Over the past two years, I’ve sat down with hundreds of IT leaders navigating a profound virtualization turning point. Drastic market shifts and soaring licensing fees from legacy vendors have squeezed budgets, forcing enterprises to reevaluate their core infrastructure and seek a sustainable path forward. Industry analysts are recognizing this shift too. And with Gartner returning to evaluate this market, Red Hat has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Server Virtualization Platforms, driven by our Completeness of Vision and Ability to execute.

We believe this server virtualization recognition validates our complete hybrid cloud platform strategy, pairing with Red Hat’s position as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrants for Container Management and Cloud-Native Application Platforms. The future belongs to a unified platform that solves today’s cost pressures while laying the groundwork for innovation.

That’s exactly what we’ve been focused on delivering, and our customer momentum speaks for itself. We’ve seen 417% growth in virtual machines (VMs) running on OpenShift Virtualization over the last year alone. More importantly, this transition is delivering real-world business outcomes across the most demanding industries.

Consider Motorola Solutions, the backbone of many public safety networks. Facing a potential 3x to 5x cost spike in their legacy virtualization footprint, Motorola Solutions used OpenShift to turn a vendor-created crisis into an opportunity. They migrated their virtualized workloads to OpenShift, creating a unified hybrid fabric. Now, they run virtualized core dispatch systems side-by-side with modern containerized AI applications. The result? Near-zero latency for mission-critical 911 call handling and dispatch services, ensuring first responders have the real-time data they need when lives are on the line.

In financial services, Emirates NBD—our 2026 Red Hat Innovator of the Year—migrated thousands of legacy virtual machines to establish a foundation for scalable, cloud-native financial services. By unifying VMs and containers on a single platform, they cut through operational complexity. Today, Emirates NBD delivers highly scalable, secure, 24x7 banking services to more than 20 million customers, proving that modernizing infrastructure directly drives top-line business growth.

Even in the most complex, high-performance environments, our customers are realizing big benefits. At NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, engineers modernized nearly 4,000 legacy VMs into more than 2,000 high-performance VMs and 4,000 containers on OpenShift Virtualization. The operational impact was immediate: a 40% reduction in infrastructure costs, the avoidance of a projected 200% to 300% cost increase from their legacy virtualization provider, and a collapse in workload deployment times from days to minutes. By simplifying and consolidating their operations, NASA has given time back to researchers and payload operators, directly accelerating human space exploration and mission-critical innovation.

When you unify your VMs and containers under one operational model and one security posture, you remove friction holding your business back. And you create a strong foundation for future innovation. Red Hat has spent over two decades engineering enterprise-grade open source platforms built on trust, transparency, and choice. As you navigate your next renewal or modernization plan, don't just look for a way out. This turning point is a time to look for a way forward.

Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift for server virtualization

A full copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms can be downloaded here.

^{Gartner Disclaimer:}

^{Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Native Application Platforms, By Mukul Saha, Alex Coqueiro, Prasanna Lakshmi Narasimha, Richard Watson, 3 August 2026.}

^{Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Container Management, By Dennis Smith, Tony Iams, Wataru Katsurashima, Lucas Albuquerque, Carolin Zhou, Bhuvie Chhabra, 2 September 2026.}

^{Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization, By Tony Harvey, Daniel Bowers, Paul Delory, Tony Iams, Owen Marino, 14 September 2026.}

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