A new update to the OpenShift environment has just been released in the market. The arrival of the Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine represents a simpler path for organizations to access workloads linked to virtualization. The platform offers customization for the deployment, management, and scalability of virtual machines (VMs), removing resources unrelated to managing these machines. This ensures that companies can maximize their technology journeys as they align their solutions with the specific needs of their infrastructure.
While containerization may have changed the way virtual machines are used for certain applications, VMs remain a fundamental tool in IT infrastructure. However, with the virtualization market undergoing significant changes in recent years, many organizations face uncertainties and increasing costs when it comes to managing their infrastructure.
For Mike Barrett, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s cloud platform, lack of standardization is one of the biggest hurdles for organizations to implement discipline. “As organizations seek to modernize their virtual environments to meet the demands of today’s IT landscape, we see that none of them are at the same point in their virtualization journey. This diversity generates different approaches they want to adopt with the solutions provided by Red Hat. Red Hat had to change the way it offered its virtualization solution to accommodate organizations that wanted to use only Red Hat OpenShift resources focused on virtualization. The Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine and Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization allow Red Hat to significantly reduce the solution cost to support these users in their modernization efforts,” he said.
Redefining virtualization through a simplified approach
The Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine helps maximize the value of these investments by including only essential OpenShift tools and components necessary for virtualization, simplifying operations, and improving efficiency. Powered by the Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and the KVM hypervisor used in enterprise data centers and the cloud, the platform can operate on on-premises hardware supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and supported bare-metal services, including AWS bare metal instances. The Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine scales to meet workload demands while providing embedded security features and more consistent performance across the hybrid cloud.
To facilitate migration efforts, the Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine includes an intuitive migration tool – the virtualization toolkit – which helps organizations move from other virtualization platforms, simplifying the migration workflow and reducing downtime while achieving greater operational continuity. Red Hat also offers the Virtualization Migration Assessment, an interactive workshop with company experts that assesses an organization’s business engines, current status, and the path to low-risk VM migration.
In addition, the Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine integrates with the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allowing IT teams to automate VM migrations at scale, along with daily VM management tasks. With this solution, organizations can automate and orchestrate in their virtualized environments and other IT areas, for more efficient, resilient, and consistent operations at scale.
Another benefit for customers is the positioning of the Red Hat partner ecosystem to support the Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine with features such as storage solutions, wide backup and disaster recovery options, and network tools to simplify deployments and scale to meet modern IT needs.
To unify VM management at scale and limit sprawl (uncontrolled proliferation), Red Hat is also introducing the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization. Built on the same essential features and technology as the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, this new solution provides a set of tools designed to centralize VM lifecycle and streamline tasks like VM provisioning, daily monitoring, and compliance, while maintaining greater consistency throughout the organization’s virtualized estate.
Availability
The Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization are already available, more information on how to get started with them can be found here.
