In the world of enterprise IT, the landscape is rarely simple. Your organization likely relies on a mix of robust, traditional applications running in virtual machines (VMs) and new, agile microservices humming along in containers. For years, this meant two separate worlds, two different management stacks, and two distinct operational headaches.
What if you could tear down that wall? What if you could manage your legacy VMs and modern containers on a single, unified platform? With Red Hat OpenShift, this isn’t just a possibility—it’s a game-changing reality.
OpenShift: The Enterprise Kubernetes Platform
At its core, OpenShift is a leading enterprise-grade container platform built on Kubernetes. It provides developers and operations teams with a powerful, secure, and automated environment to build, ship, and run containerized applications at scale. It’s the platform of choice for organizations looking to embrace cloud-native technologies and DevOps practices.
But its capabilities no longer stop with containers.
Introducing OpenShift Virtualization 🤖
The magic happens with a feature called OpenShift Virtualization. Built on the open-source project KubeVirt, this powerful addition allows you to run and manage traditional virtual machines right alongside containers within the same OpenShift cluster.
This isn’t about running OpenShift inside a VM. It’s about treating VMs as another resource that Kubernetes can manage. Your virtual-machine.yaml can now live in the same Git repository as your container-deployment.yaml. You can manage both using the same command-line tools (oc, kubectl) and the same web console you already use for your containers.
The Benefits: Why Mix VMs and Containers?
Bringing these two worlds together on one platform unlocks tremendous benefits, moving beyond simple consolidation to true transformation.
1. Drastically Simplify Your Infrastructure
Say goodbye to managing separate infrastructures for virtualization (like vSphere or oVirt) and containers. With OpenShift, you have one platform to rule them all. This means:
- Reduced Operational Overhead: Your teams only need to patch, secure, and manage a single, integrated platform.
- Lower Costs: Consolidating your infrastructure reduces licensing costs, hardware footprint, and the need for specialized skills across multiple platforms.
- Unified Management: Manage everything from bare metal to VMs to containers through a single pane of glass.
2. Accelerate Application Modernization 🚀
OpenShift Virtualization provides a seamless on-ramp to modernization. It allows you to create a bridge from your past to your future.
The strategy is simple:
- Import Existing VMs: Lift and shift your existing VMs (running critical legacy applications, databases, etc.) directly into OpenShift.
- Modernize at Your Pace: Once a VM is running on the platform, you can begin to gradually decompose it. You can peel off a specific function, rebuild it as a containerized microservice, and have it communicate with the original VM over the internal OpenShift network.
- Co-exist Seamlessly: The new container and the old VM can run side-by-side on the same platform, managed as a single application. This eliminates the « big bang » migration risk and allows for a stable, iterative modernization process.
3. Unified DevOps for Everyone
Imagine your developers and operations teams using the same CI/CD pipelines, tools, and workflows for both your VM-based applications and your new cloud-native services.
- Consistent Workflows: Use tools like GitOps to manage the lifecycle of both VMs and containers from a single source of truth.
- Break Down Silos: When everyone uses the same platform, collaboration becomes easier. The VM admins and the container specialists are no longer on separate islands; they’re working together on a unified platform.
4. Supercharge Your VMs
Running your VMs on OpenShift means they can benefit from the rich, cloud-native ecosystem that was once reserved for containers. You can leverage the platform’s built-in capabilities for:
- Advanced Networking: Utilize OpenShift’s robust Software-Defined Networking (SDN) for your VMs.
- Centralized Observability: Pipe logs and metrics from both VMs and containers into a single, unified monitoring and alerting stack.
A Final Thought
OpenShift with OpenShift Virtualization fundamentally changes how we think about IT infrastructure. It acknowledges the reality that modern enterprises are hybrid by nature—not just in terms of cloud and on-prem, but in the applications they run. By providing a single, powerful platform for both VMs and containers, OpenShift breaks down silos, streamlines operations, and creates a clear, manageable path to the future of application development.
