OpenShift 4: Rise of the Container Native VM

Welcome to the Future

For years we’ve been hearing about migrating your legacy application to a modern micro-services based framework running across container environments. Reality, though, can be a bit more messy than that. Plenty of legacy apps running on VMs are difficult to migrate and could make the journey to a container based environment seem too far out of reach or just too demanding of an effort. Sometimes consultants can be brought in but that adds cost and complexity. Migrating to a modern container environment running micro-services used to be an all or nothing proposition for your applications… But no longer.

The Rise of Container Native VMs

Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform can only help manage Kubernetes clusters right? Wrong. Starting with OpenShift 4.3 you can now deploy and manage both container native applications and applications running on virtual machines side by side as workloads on your Kubernetes cluster. All this is made possible by leveraging the OpenShift Virtualization Operator that allows you to spin up and manage your VMs in a matter of moments. 

How is this possible? As with all things Red Hat, open source technology is at the heart of our offerings. KubeVirt is the open source project, started by Red Hat, that makes it possible to run virtual machines in a Kubernetes-managed container platform. 

OpenShift Virtualization now enables OpenShift to offer the same CI/CD life-cycle for VMs as it does containers. Allowing you to free up your time away from repetitive tasks and toward innovation. OpenShift Operators create and manage the life-cycle of VMs just as they do the containerized aspects of your applications so you are leveraging the power of Operators like you would with other applications and features in OpenShift.

OpenShift also supports VMs that can be Linux or Windows. If you have an application running on a VM it can almost certainly be migrated into your OpenShift environment.  

And to make that migration easier you can also import and clone existing virtual machines, including VMware and Red Hat Virtualization hosted virtual machines. This allows you to migrate your existing workloads effortlessly and safely into one OpenShift platform for easy management and scalability.

Managing network interface controllers and storage disks attached to virtual machines is also possible thanks to OpenShift Virtualization. This allows you to handle dependencies relating to the newly migrated VMs with ease. 

Practical Cases

So why would you need to use OpenShift Virtualization?

Sometimes migrating a VM based application into a micro-services offering simply isn’t worth the effort. To make things worse it becomes an increasingly frustrating experience when your team begins developing micro-services running in containers alongside your legacy VM based applications. For those situations where your best option is to simply wait for the eventual end of life of your monolithic apps running on VMs, OpenShift Virtualization offers you a flexible way to keep those VMs and still push forward with your digital transformation.

Similarly, there are those VMs that you want to containerize but at the moment don’t have the resources and time to do it. OpenShift Virtualization allows you to move that VM into the OpenShift environment so that you can transform it into micro-services gradually over time. Again, flexibility and a gentler pace for your migration into containers are at the core of what OpenShift Virtualization is offering. Two fellow Red Hatters break down these use cases in a bit more detail here. Reducing extra systems and simplifying your environment is going to make things more affordable now and later which is something we can all get behind.

Final Thoughts

The only absolute in life is that there are none. The same is true with IT environments and for some that means having a combination of VMs and Containers running alongside each other. Red Hat can help make that easy on day 1 and day 100. Eventually, everyone will end up with modern micro-service based environments running on containers but you don’t have to wait anymore to begin the process on account of a few legacy VMs. That is what OpenShift is empowering you with. The ability to take the next step toward your ideal IT environment no matter where you are on that journey. Checkout the latest at Red Hat and with OpenShift.