According to Gartner, “By 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 30% in 2019. While this report indicates that cloud-native applications are the future of business innovation and the focus of new application development, many organizations still have large investments in business-critical applications that run as traditional virtual machines (VMs). Red Hat OpenShift now includes OpenShift Virtualization, a new platform feature that enables IT organizations to bring standard VM-based workloads to Kubernetes, helping eliminate the workflow and development silos that typically exist between traditional and cloud-native application stacks.
Breaking down walls between cloud-native and traditional workloads
First introduced at Red Hat Summit 2020 as a technology preview feature, OpenShift Virtualization is now generally available and included with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform at no additional cost. Derived from the KubeVirt open source project, OpenShift Virtualization enables organizations to develop, deploy and manage applications consisting of VMs alongside containers and serverless functions, all in one modern Kubernetes platform running on bare-metal infrastructure. With OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat brings traditional application stacks forward into a layer of open innovation, enabling customers to truly transform at their own speed.
By bringing new and existing applications to the same architecture, OpenShift Virtualization provides a consistent development experience and turbocharges an organization’s ability to deliver quickly on innovation. Once VMs are migrated to and managed by Red Hat OpenShift, they can be containerized over time, or be maintained as virtual machines. This allows users to develop and deliver hybrid applications built on containers and VMs to run side-by-side on the same platform.
Increased flexibility and choice for underlying infrastructure
Red Hat OpenShift 4.5 also introduces full-stack automation for VMware vSphere deployments, making it “push-button” easy to deploy Red Hat OpenShift on top of all currently supported vSphere environments. With full-stack automation, the administrator only needs to provide credentials to a vSphere deployment, and the installer provisions all of the resources needed, enabling a faster initial setup experience and easier ongoing management and maintenance. This adds to OpenShift’s existing support for VMware vSphere deployments on pre-existing infrastructure, which provides administrators the flexibility to deploy OpenShift in highly customized vSphere environments.
Over time, the full-stack automation installation experience has expanded to include AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat OpenStack Platform, allowing customers to deploy OpenShift clusters across different clouds and on-premises with the same fully automated experience. Now with the ability to fully automate vSphere deployments, Red Hat makes it easier for organizations to run an enterprise container platform on existing virtual infrastructure, providing organizations even more choice when it comes to their underlying infrastructure platform.