Why is OpenShift Virtualization becoming the strategic platform for virtualization customers?

We are 2 years in on a strategic shift in virtualization. Although this shift created some initial panic, most customers have taken advantage of this shift as an opportunity to make a more strategic decision on where they want to go on their virtualization journey.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is built on innovation, where customer needs inspire our engineers to deliver high-impact solutions to help them move from concept to general availability in a matter of months, not years. It’s no surprise that this commitment to rapid, customer-focused innovation earned OpenShift Virtualization the 2025 CRN Innovator Award for the launch of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine, a virtualization-only edition for Red Hat OpenShift.

The engineering team velocity is one of the core reasons OpenShift Virtualization has become a trusted platform for many of the top enterprises across the world. Customer feedback backs the confidence in our platform, with one customer calling out that the product enhancements they had asked for at the beginning of a proof of concept (POC) were actually delivered by the time the POC was finishing. To us, that’s trusted, enterprise-ready innovation! 

Beyond comprehensive engineering skills, this velocity requires 2 more things: 

• A profound understanding of the space and customer goals, which we provide through our engineers meeting with customers, getting real time feedback on platform capabilities, and together, shaping the outcomes for a given project.
• Mature technologies and knowing how to harness them into a cloud-native solution, driven by our nearly 2 decades of KVM virtualization experience and many years of Kubernetes expertise. Combined, our engineering teams are capable of reimagining a virtualization suite which augments and complements Kubernetes at every technology and stack layer.

Additionally, combining Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can increase customers’ overall level of automation. OpenShift features like GitOps help automate the infrastructure management of adding nodes and maintenance of the infrastructure. Ansible Automation Platform collections automate Day 2 VM operations such as patch management. It’s this ability to drive automation for the entire virtualization infrastructure that enables Red Hat to elevate expectations for organizations in terms of what they expect from their platform vendor. 

The innovations go beyond engineering with the partner ecosystem team, sales, services and marketing teaming up to create innovative solutions. The creation of the Red Hat Virtualization Migration Assessment and Virtualization Migration Factory has already handled over a million VMs.

Sometimes ideas can take a life of their own and the OpenShift Virtualization Roadshow is one such concept. We wanted to see if OpenShift Virtualization could pass muster with virtualization admins, so we offered admins a hands-on lab workshop to go through common day-to-day operations. After a handful of pilots, the OpenShift Virtualization Roadshow came to be, which has brought the OpenShift Virtualization experience to nearly every country. If you are a virtualization admin and haven’t had a chance to experience this hands-on event, you can register your interest today. Additionally, there are many other ways you can experience OpenShift Virtualization, including the Red Hat Level Up Program for OpenShift Virtualization, which can help both existing customers and potential new users. 

You can’t simply focus on the hypervisor, however, and have an effective, modern virtualization experience; you also need a comprehensive workload and ISV ecosystem. For OpenShift Virtualization, we build on the already successful and trusted world of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) workloads, as well as the Windows Server Virtualization Validation program for compatibility with Windows applications.

Red Hat’s partner organization provides a streamlined approach to potential partners through labs, ecosystem engineers, and program management support. Additionally, OpenShift Virtualization has been able to build out comprehensive collaborations with public clouds, storage, data protection, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and other applications vendors. Many of these relationships are multifaceted, enabling us to share roadmaps and solution direction, as well as help support and increase related upstream open source community efforts.  

Customers are successfully achieving internal milestones and experiencing dramatic VM count growth as they shift to the modern OpenShift Virtualization platform. If you are making a decision on a strategic platform, consider some of the reasons that these customers have opted for OpenShift Virtualization: 

• Customers are looking at a consistent hybrid cloud strategy, whether on premise, cloud, or edge.
• Many customers have diverse IT investments, from operating systems (OS) and 3-tier storage architectures to x86 servers and other architectures, and they need a platform that preserves these critical resources.
• They want a vendor that they can trust over the long run, and Red Hat’s open source approach provides them with the confidence that we need to earn their trust on each renewal. 
• Working with a company that is known for reliability is critical for them, and Red Hat has implementations in the most sensitive banking applications, manufacturing plants, retail stores, telecommunications, media, logistics, healthcare, government agencies, and other industries. 
• A platform for today and tomorrow to avoid technological dead ends and further technical debt by having one platform that can run VMs along with containerized applications, cloud-native workloads, and AI.

Red Hat has built a level of trust over multiple decades as not only a vendor but a strategic partner, as well. We build our products from the ground up for a uniform experience, not a strategy of “bolting on” additional components or packages to solve point-in-time problems. We see our customers not purely looking for a-like-for-like virtualization experience, but a solution that incorporates modern capabilities, vendor stability, and strategic evaluation for the long term. This is why we believe that Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is the platform of choice for today’s current needs and tomorrow’s innovations.  

Check out this year’s state of virtualization report to learn how users are considering their virtualization needs and how Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization addresses many of their top challenges. 

Additional resources

• Watch: Red Hat Summit 2025 Day 1 Keynote - Enterprise AI & modern infrastructure

• Watch: TheCube interview