By Wes Urquhart | 60 Min Video

Recent market conditions have forced every entity, institution, and organization to consider the future of their virtualized workloads:

• Should they continue to be virtualized? If so, where should we be running them?
• Should we consider migrating them to a different platform? Red Hat wants to help IT leaders find the answers to these questions and ensure that leaders know

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization offers both a safe harbor for virtualized workloads in the short term and the option to modernize at their chosen pace in the long term.

In this webinar, we:

• Address the reasons virtualization is top of mind for most in IT
• Discuss how Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization provides a safe landing spot for virtualized workloads that need to be migrated quickly
• Review technical details around Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, its architecture, and some real customer success stories
• Demonstrate how anyone new to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization can get the crash course they need with Red Hat Training

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Why Virtualization Is Critical Now

• Market and economic pressures have IT teams re-evaluating virtual workloads: Should they stay virtualized, move to the cloud, or modernize? 
• Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization offers a safe short-term landing zone while enabling long-term modernization, giving organizations flexibility in how and when they evolve their workloads.

What OpenShift Virtualization Offers

• It runs VMs alongside container workloads in the same Kubernetes-based environment, eliminating the need for separate platforms.
• Enables seamless hybrid environments, letting legacy VMs coexist with containers and be modernized at your own pace.
• Improves resource utilization and cost efficiency, since both VM and container workloads can share hardware dynamically.

Architecture and Core Components

Built on KubeVirt with key operators:

• HyperConverged Operator (HCO) orchestrates the ecosystem (KubeVirt, CDI, SSP, etc.).
• KubeVirt handles the compute layer (virt-api, virt-controller, virt-handler, virt-launcher).
• CDI (Containerized Data Importer) manages VM image import into PVCs.
• CNAO adds VM networking via plugins like Multus.
• SSP provides VM templates and scaling capabilities; HPP handles hostpath storage.

Migration and Management Tools

• Migration Toolkit for Virtualization simplifies importing VMs from hypervisors, bridging legacy investments with modern infrastructure.
• Use Ansible Automation Platform to orchestrate large-scale VM deployments and Day‑2 operations, supporting ongoing lifecycle tasks.

Networking, Storage, and Security

• Network integration: Leverages Kubernetes SDN, Multus, SR‑IOV, service mesh, and network policies to isolate and secure VM traffic.
• Storage architecture: VMs use Kubernetes Persistent Volumes via CSI, enabling dynamic provisioning, snapshots, and consistent backup workflows.
• Security alignment: VMs gain Kubernetes-style RBAC, network policies, and security context enforcement across both containers and VMs.

High Availability, Scaling, and DR

• Supports HA features: live migration (akin to vMotion), VM replicas, node failure recovery via KubeVirt and Kubernetes reconciliation.
• Scaling: Treat VMs like cloud-native workloads—schedule, quota, and scale them alongside containers using Kubernetes primitives.
• DR and backup: Integrates with OADP and Velero (CSI snapshot-based) for VM backups and recovery; smaller VMware features (e.g. vSphere VADP) may still lead in enterprise environments.

Real-world Considerations and Best Practices

• Migration planning: Evaluate workload dependencies, sizing, networking, storage, and security before migrating.
• Understand that managing VMs through Kubernetes requires familiarity with YAML manifests, Helm charts, policies, etc.
• Recommend sandbox/testing clusters to learn and troubleshoot without affecting production.
• Tooling ecosystem: Leverage GitOps (ArgoCD), Pipelines (Tekton), Prometheus/Grafana, Service Mesh, and Ansible across VMs and containers.

Use Cases and Audience

• Ideal for hybrid workloads—running legacy x86 VMs alongside modern microservices.
• Offers a migration path for VMware users to reduce licensing costs and vendor lock-in.
• Suited for dev/test environments, hybrid clouds, and organizations needing unified infrastructure management.

Final Takeaways

OpenShift Virtualization solves core virtualization challenges by bridging legacy VM workloads with container-native infrastructure. It does this through a modular, Kubernetes-native architecture, seamless migration tooling, full networking, storage, and security integration, and compatibility with existing CI/CD and automation ecosystems. For teams ready to learn Kubernetes and embrace hybrid infrastructure, it offers a cohesive bridge to modernization—without abandoning the workloads that still need VMs.

Instructor Bio:

Wes is a Solutions Architect at Red Hat, covering all things Red Hat Training and Certification has to offer. He holds various Red Hat certifications in Linux, Containers, and Kubernetes and particularly enjoys discussing customer challenges in application architecture and API design. He is based out of Durham, North Carolina.