Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization helps organizations migrate, run, and manage virtual machines alongside modern workloads on a trusted, modern platform.

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What is virtualization?

Virtualization lets you create multiple simulated environments or resources from a single, physical hardware system. This is possible with a hypervisor, which is software that creates and runs virtual machines (VMs) to connect to the hardware and split the single system into separate and distinct VMs. Resources like CPU, storage, and memory can be pooled and relocated across different hardware hosts. Because multiple operating systems can share the same physical hardware, virtualization is a critical IT technology that improves efficiency, hardware capacity, and flexibility.

Virtualization fundamentals

Virtualization

Creation of a virtual, rather than physical, version of a server, storage device, operating system, or network resource.

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Containers

Learn how containers and Kubernetes have changed traditional development processes and tools.

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What is a hypervisor?

Learn how hypervisors differ from VMs and the considerations to make when choosing one.

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What is a virtual machine?

Get an overview of VMs and their advantages.

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Overview

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is the virtualization capability that is included within all Red Hat OpenShift versions that allows you to run and manage VM workloads alongside container workloads. Built on the KVM hypervisor and KubeVirt architecture, OpenShift Virtualization allows VMs to participate in a cloud-native environment to reduce operational separation.

OpenShift Virtualization lets you run VMs on the kernel of worker nodes and run via KVM as a standard VM that is managed and controlled by containers. Each VM has its own control plane that runs as a pod on OpenShift. Access controls (via ports), additional storage and start/stop/restart/delete are all executed and controlled by the virt-launcher Pod. The control plane controls access to the VM as a set of services on the SDN in OpenShift just like other workloads.

What is KVM?

Discover more about Kernel-based virtual machines.

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Plan your VM migration

See what migration could look like in your environment at no cost.

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Benefits of OpenShift Virtualization

Ease of migration

Supports slow path migration lift-and-shift without any application changes and strategic migration at your own pace. Uses the included migration toolkit for virtualization to migrate existing VMs.

Accelerate production

Build, test, and deploy workloads quickly and consistently with a set of cloud-native toolings across VMs and modern workloads. Explore containerization and application modernization on the same platform.

One platform across all apps

OpenShift Virtualization makes operations simpler by providing a single platform for VMs, containers, and emerging workloads such as AI.

OpenShift Virtualization for VMware administrators

Transitioning your infrastructure shouldn't feel like deciphering a new language. This concise guide helps VMware administrators efficiently manage virtual machines (VMs) within the powerful OpenShift platform and provides insight into features and functionalities found across both Red Hat OpenShift and VMware, including:

Storage: From datastores to PersistentVolumes, understand where your VM disks live and how storage is managed in OpenShift.
Networking: Demystify OpenShift network policies by seeing how to access features like network configuration, software-defined networking, and virtual machine connectivity.
Compute resources: Grasp compute concepts across monitoring, migration, resource balancing, and more in OpenShift, drawing parallels to vCenter and vMotion.
Observability: Learn how OpenShift's monitoring and alerting tools relate to functions across VMware vSphere.
Virtual machine components: See the direct mapping of VM tools, NIC types, SCSI controllers, snapshot functionalities, and more.

Download the cheat sheet