Red Hat OpenShift: Not just for Containers?
Discover the future of virtualisation, as we break down Red Hat’s latest webinar on OpenShift Virtualization, sharing the features, benefits, and practical considerations of adopting OpenShift Virtualization within a Kubernetes environment.
Tier 2’s Red Hat experts are providing a complimentary discovery call to address virtualisation challenges, discuss the benefits of OpenShift Virtualization or alternative solutions, and outline a high-level implementation plan with cost estimates.
OpenShift Virtualization Discovery Call
Written by Jonathan Gazeley, Container Platform Consultant, Tier 2 Consulting.
Virtualisation has been a hot topic lately. Last week I attended a Red Hat webinar on OpenShift Virtualization (OSV), and it was pretty interesting – if a little light on technical detail at this stage, with more deep dive sessions promised over the coming weeks
Basically, OSV wraps the open source project KubeVirt, which uses the open source virtualisation engine KVM (the same as the existing Red Hat Virtualization) to effectively package up VMs as containers, and run them in a Kubernetes cluster as pods.
OSV is now the only virtualisation product marketed by Red Hat, since Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) has reached its end of life. They have been pushing it more since the VMware acquisition, understandably! I was sceptical of how good it could actually be – after all, OSV has some additional complexity over traditional virtualisation (because you have to understand Kubernetes as well as virtualisation!)
However, my biggest takeaway from the webinar was the conveniences that OSV can offer – like the ability that your VMs are now managed via the same Kubernetes API as your containers, so all your VMs can now be managed via yaml in git, or deployed by a CI/CD pipeline. It’s an absolute game-changer if you’re used to the VMware GUI.
Shared resources like networking and storage, such as Portworx, are natively software-defined in Kubernetes and your VMs can now take advantage of the many benefits of software-defined networking and software-defined storage. This makes it much easier to integrate a hybrid environment with VMs and containers.
OSV is now a standard component of OpenShift Container Platform, and does not require additional subscriptions. Switching your existing virtualisation platform to OSV could even give you cost savings, because if you pay for OCP, you can run unlimited RHEL guest VMs. On VMware or other hypervisors, you’d have to buy separate subscriptions for the guest VMs, either by buying separate RHEL subscriptions, or by buying RHEL Virtual DataCentre.
Red Hat also provides migration tools, both from VMware and Red Hat Virtualization, to make your journey towards OpenShift Virtualization as smooth as possible. Red Hat are hosting more webinars on other aspects of OSV, and we will be watching them with a keen eye, to bring you the most relevant information.
How can Tier 2 help?
Tier 2’s Red Hat experts are offering a free-of-charge discovery call to:
- Help clarify your virtualisation challenges and requirements;
- Outline potential benefits of OpenShift Virtualisation or alternative solutions
- Define a high-level implementation plan, with indicative estimates and costs.
