Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization basics

Before moving forward with the migration, it’s important to understand the benefits and features of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and discover why it is a great alternative for your virtual applications. 

In order to get full benefit from taking this lesson, you need:

• A Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization cluster.
• The migration toolkit for virtualization operator.
• An NFS server that will be hosting the OVA file.
• An OVA format file.

In this lesson, you will:

• Understand the benefits of migrating to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.
• Begin migration assessment and planning.

Benefits of migrating to OpenShift Virtualization

Users can reap many benefits of migrating to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, including:

• A reduction of commercial risk exposure: Changes in the virtualization landscape have increased customer exposure to unpredictable commercial costs and risks. Moving to Red Hat's open source virtualization platform can mitigate many of the commercial risks and offer a compelling total cost of ownership (TCO) that is significantly lower than the legacy platform it is replacing.
• Access to a unified platform: Run containerized and virtualized workloads in one place, simplifying operations, maintenance, and monitoring. 
• Data migration with ease: Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization provides access to tools that enable easy migration from multiple hypervisors, including VMware.
• Integration management for Kubernetes: Enable Kubernetes scaling, scheduling, and monitoring features for your virtual machines (VMs).
• Improved resource utilization: Colocate VMs with containers for better resource efficiency, reducing the additional overhead cost associated with managing different infrastructures.  
• Access to the Red Hat ecosystem: By leveraging and integrating with Red Hat’s product offerings, organizations can tap into a robust Cloud Native Computing Function (CNCF) and partner ecosystem, ensuring optimal performance and scalability for both containerized and virtualized workloads across diverse infrastructures and applications.

Migration assessment and planning

A successful migration begins with an assessment to satisfy the following key objectives:

1. Design the target virtualization landing zone, including hardware, platform, and enterprise integration design considerations.
2. Design the automated, integrated migration factory that will migrate your VM estate.
3. Discover the VM estate and map out the migration timeline and velocity.
4. Understand the cost of the migration and production-readiness.

This includes the following:

• Inventory of virtual machines: Prepare an inventory of virtual machines to be migrated, including configurations, operating systems, and applications.
• Dependency between VM applications and other components: Identify dependencies between your VMs and other components such as databases, storage systems, or externally provided services.
• Sizing and capacity planning: Determine your virtual machine’s physical resource requirements like CPU, memory, and storage. Ensure your Red Hat OpenShift environment is appropriately sized for current and future scaling needs.
• Migration objectives: Define a clear list of objectives for this migration (e.g., modernization, cost optimization, performance improvement, and more).

Similar considerations and planning might be needed for day 2 operations and orchestration of migration.