Ask an OpenShift Admin Office Hour - VMs in OpenShift?

Normally we think of OpenShift as being deployed to virtual machines, but did you know that you can deploy virtual machines to OpenShift? Released as generally available alongside OpenShift 4.5 (July 2020), OpenShift Virtualization does just that - KVM-based virtual machines which are deployed, scheduled, and managed using the Pod paradigm.

This week, on the cusp of a new release, Peter Lauterbach, Product Manager for OpenShift Virtualization, joined us during the stream to discuss the features, capabilities, and use cases for OpenShift Virtualization. If you’re deploying new applications using containers, but have some virtualized dependencies, and you want to consolidate them onto a single, modern platform, then this is the show for you!

As always, please see the list below for additional links to specific topics, questions, and supporting materials for the episode!

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Episode 20 recorded stream:

Supporting links for today’s topic:

• The documentation for OpenShift Virtualization, including how to deploy and configure the Operator, can be found here.
• What’s new in OpenShift Virtualization 2.6.
• What’s new in OpenShift Virtualization 2.5, including a performance comparison between OpenShift Virtualization and Red Hat Virtualization.
• The Migration Toolkit for Virtualization beta was made available earlier this week, if you haven’t seen this tool for simplifying the migration of virtual machines to OpenShift Virtualization, definitely see this video!
• If you want to try out the upstream project, KubeVirt, they have a number of KataCoda labs you can choose from and use - no registration needed and no cost!

Other links and materials referenced during the stream:

• We talked about how to avoid filling up a vSphere datastore with PVC data by modifying the configuration and adding StorageClasses.
• We also talked about how to resize control plane nodes. Unfortunately, it’s not supported to simply power down the node, adjust the resources, and power it back on. The recommended method is to remove the node from the cluster, reprovision with the new resources, and then rejoin the cluster.

Other questions answered during the stream:

• We did some rapidfire answering of questions starting here in the stream, addressing several questions such as: is there a reference architecture for NFV on OpenShift Virtualization? Can OpenShift Virtualization orchestrate VMs for OpenStack? Does nested virtualization work and is it supported? Will OpenShift Virtualization work with hyperscaler bare metal instances? What other OpenShift features work with OpenShift Virtualization? Roadmap? And, of course, several more!