The value of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization partner ecosystem

Introduction

In today’s shifting virtualization landscape, businesses face decisions about evolving their infrastructure to meet modern demands.

Many organizations are looking for solutions to move their virtual machines (VMs) to unified platforms where those VMs can sit beside containers and cloud-native architectures. Red Hat® OpenShift® Virtualization, included in Red Hat OpenShift, addresses these needs by combining the proven Red Hat OpenShift platform with critical virtualization capabilities.

With this transition from traditional virtualization solutions to a modern platform, organizations seek comprehensive solutions.

With OpenShift Virtualization, you unlock an entire global ecosystem of independent software vendor (ISV) partners. The Red Hat's network of partners brings together specialized software partners’ expertise in areas such as storage, networking, and disaster recovery, helping businesses navigate transitions without starting from scratch. By supporting a broad range of ISV technologies, OpenShift Virtualization offers a flexible toolkit for companies to expand their infrastructure with solutions they know and trust.

Red Hat’s ISV partners play a vital role in every step of the virtualization journey: from VM migrations to ongoing management. This collaborative partner ecosystem helps businesses deploy comprehensive solutions that meet their specific goals, creating a strong foundation for growth in a cloud-native world.

Chapter 1: Flexibility and choice with Red Hat and ISV partners

Red Hat’s ecosystem of ISV partners provides businesses with the flexibility to design and manage their virtualization solutions.

OpenShift Virtualization allows companies to build environments that suit their unique requirements without locking or limiting them to a particular vendor's tools or technologies. This flexibility helps organizations build solutions tailored to their particular needs, shift more rapidly as needs change, and simplify their path towards a cloud-native future.

Through a network of certified ISV partners, OpenShift Virtualization allows companies to continue using technologies they already know and trust on a cloud-native platform. Familiar tools in storage, networking, backup, and security are often already present in their existing infrastructure, and the ability to integrate these solutions with OpenShift Virtualization removes some of the complexity that often accompanies large-scale technology transitions. Certified partners help streamline the migration process, allowing organizations to move more quickly without sacrificing quality or stability.

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What is Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization?

OpenShift Virtualization is the virtualization functionality available in all editions of Red Hat OpenShift. For organizations focused exclusively on VMs, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine offers a dedicated edition of Red Hat OpenShift to run and manage VMs with a streamlined path towards modernization. When users are ready, they can upgrade to the full Red Hat OpenShift platform to manage VMs alongside containers on a unified, modern platform. Backed by Red Hat’s open source expertise and extensive partner ecosystem, Red Hat OpenShift provides the flexibility and stability to support each stage of an organization’s virtualization journey.

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By combining OpenShift Virtualization with specialized ISV expertise, organizations can configure their virtualization solution to meet specific operational requirements. For example, a company focused on high-performance data handling might incorporate a storage solution from a partner such as Portworx by Pure Storage. Another organization with strong security needs might prioritize networking solutions from partners such as F5. This choice-based approach gives each organization the ability to tailor its virtualization environment with tools and capabilities that best fit its priorities.

Red Hat and its ISV partners offer organizations the power to build a virtualization solution that reflects their individual goals and requirements. This flexibility in choosing technology partners also helps streamline the adoption of new tools, as teams can rely on their existing knowledge and expertise. The partner ecosystem provides not only a comprehensive foundation for current needs, but also positions organizations to scale and adapt in the future.

Chapter 2: Access partner expertise in critical areas

Red Hat’s certified ISV partners help organizations transition smoothly and maintain reliable, high-performance virtualized environments.

Storage

You can run, scale, and help protect business-critical applications on Red Hat OpenShift with the integration of storage software partners.

ISV partners specializing in storage, such as NetApp and Portworx, provide container-native solutions to streamline data migration and management. Storage partners simplify the process of moving critical data from traditional environments with OpenShift Virtualization, reducing downtime and operational disruption. By integrating container-friendly storage options, these ISV partners help organizations that have migrated to a Red Hat OpenShift solution in modernizing their workflows. They also offer solutions for scalable storage, allowing organizations to grow their data capacity alongside their virtualized environments.

Find more storage software partners

Networking, security, and observability

Networking and security software partners for OpenShift Virtualization offer high-performance, scalable networking solutions that create segmentation and provide centralized management of different security levels within an organization’s infrastructure.

Networking-focused ISVs such as Cisco and Tigera bring comprehensive network management capabilities to OpenShift Virtualization. Networking partners enhance OpenShift Virtualization’s scalability, allowing companies to expand and safeguard their environments without sacrificing performance. Traffic management focused ISVs such as F5 and Palo Alto Networks address key concerns around network traffic and data flow, adding threat protection between VMs.

Application security partners such as CyberArk and CrowdStrike complement the network and traffic management partners to help protect the infrastructure and workloads at the perimeter and between VMs through identity management and application monitoring.

Observability tools provided by partners such as PacketRanger and Checkmk help IT teams track performance, detect potential issues early, and keep systems running smoothly. Using existing IT monitoring tools can increase availability and reduce management overhead.

Find more software partners:

Networking

Security

Observability

Backup and disaster recovery

Backup and disaster recovery software partners help customers protect their data as they transition from another virtualized environment to a Red Hat OpenShift based-solution.

Cohesity, Veeam Kasten, and Trilio provide tools for safeguarding data during and after migration. Backup partners focus on transferring data and recovering it efficiently in case of an unexpected event. In migration scenarios, backup solutions minimize the risk of data loss, providing organizations with peace of mind as they transition. Post-migration, these solutions allow organizations to maintain regular backups and disaster recovery protocols, supporting data integrity and operational continuity.

Find more backup and DR software partners

Workloads and other featured integrations

Running workloads such as databases and virtual desktops on OpenShift Virtualization offers advantages for organizations seeking to consolidate and modernize their IT infrastructure. By hosting these virtual applications alongside containerized workloads on a unified Red Hat OpenShift platform, organizations can achieve greater operational efficiency and streamlined management.

OpenShift Virtualization is built on the same Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor that is included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux®. Applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux are also compatible with OpenShift Virtualization when deployed in VMs. This provides a library of applications that are ready to deploy, and allows organizations to take advantage of Red Hat OpenShift's management, automation, and scaling capabilities for databases such as Cockroach DB and Citrix virtual desktop environments.

The ability to use shared resources from other parts of the ecosystem such as security and storage, consistent tooling, and a common control plane, can enhance performance and improve security posture across the application ecosystem.

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The partner for your solution

Red Hat’s partners provide organizations with the choice and flexibility that best suits their business needs and helps them extend, augment, and take advantage of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. They can rely on Red Hat’s global ISV partners for specialization and depth of capabilities without fear of vendor lock-in.

Visit the Ecosystem Catalog for OpenShift Virtualization

Chapter 3: Put it all together with services partners and OpenShift Virtualization

Professional services partners work closely with organizations to understand the unique demands of their environment.

Professional services partners work together with both Red Hat and ISV partners to design and implement solutions for OpenShift Virtualization that operate smoothly and are aligned with both short-term and long-term goals. Services partners understand the unique demands of each organization’s environment, making sure that solutions operate smoothly with OpenShift Virtualization.

OpenShift Virtualization’s mature network of system integrators brings specialized expertise in managing complex environments, which is vital when combining multiple technologies. They guide organizations through the complex technical and operational steps of planning, configuring, and implementing virtualization with Red Hat OpenShift and its partner solutions. With this support, organizations can streamline deployment, reduce potential disruptions, and achieve optimal results across their virtualized environments.

As organizations expand and adopt hybrid, edge, or multicloud strategies, system integrators provide ongoing guidance and expertise that keeps these environments aligned with business objectives. By facilitating collaboration between Red Hat’s global ISV partners, integrators help deliver tailored solutions that create efficiency, flexibility, and future readiness. Together, Red Hat, its ISV partners, and system integrators form a powerful team, positioning organizations to realize the full potential of OpenShift Virtualization in a way that scales with their needs.

Success story

SiriusXM modernizes virtualization without missing a beat

SiriusXM wanted a single control plane that could handle today’s VMs and tomorrow’s cloud-native workloads, whether on premise, at the edge, or in any public cloud. In collaboration with Red Hat and Portworx by Pure Storage, SiriusXM was able to create a single application stack that can run across hybrid cloud environments to support both VMs and containers without sacrificing core requirements around performance, disaster recovery, and automation.

Chapter 4: Unlock future potential with OpenShift Virtualization

After migrating VMs to OpenShift Virtualization, organizations can explore new paths to modernization that go beyond traditional virtualization.

With VMs operating alongside containers in a cloud-native setting, organizations gain the flexibility to evolve their application landscape based on changing demands.

Through consistent management tooling, organizations have the freedom to migrate and run their VMs across on-premise, cloud, and edge environments. OpenShift Virtualization offers the ability to dynamically scale applications in the cloud while optimizing resource utilization and reducing overhead.

ISV partners play an essential role in these advanced use cases, providing specialized tools and services that support expansion and optimization. Storage partners, for example, help organizations handle data at scale, while networking partners facilitate smooth, security-focused connections across distributed environments. Partners focused on monitoring and security offer critical insights that keep performance high and workloads protected as infrastructure grows.

OpenShift Virtualization includes capabilities for organizations to modernize traditional applications when they are ready without disruption. By gradually adopting cloud-native practices, including GitOps and service mesh, and running VMs alongside containers, OpenShift Virtualization provides a unified and flexible platform for organizations to run their modern workloads. Red Hat’s ISV partners strengthen this transition, helping organizations make full use of OpenShift Virtualization as a long-term platform for growth and modernization.

Conclusion

Together with a robust ecosystem of ISV partners, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization provides organizations a powerful path to migrate and modernize their VMs.

Through a combination of containerized operations and tailored support in critical areas such as storage, networking, backup, and disaster recovery, OpenShift Virtualization solutions deliver the flexibility businesses need to adapt and grow. By working with certified ISV partners, companies gain tools that can simplify migration and build a foundation for innovation within a cloud-native architecture.

As you consider your next steps, OpenShift Virtualization offers the opportunity to create a comprehensive environment that meets today’s demands and scales for tomorrow’s goals. With the support of certified ISV partners, your organization can adopt solutions that protect data, optimize network management, and strengthen system performance. We encourage you to evaluate your broader infrastructure needs and explore how Red Hat OpenShift products and Red Hat’s ecosystem of ISV partners can support business-critical workloads in a unified, adaptable environment.