We are happy to announce a new Generally Available release of OpenShift Virtualization 4.10. This is an important milestone in our virtualization strategy, with key development from the upstream KubeVirt community as previously announced at Red Hat Summit.

Many thanks to our teams who constantly deliver high quality capabilities, enabling our customers and partners to easily modernize and better serve their users.

What customers say about OpenShift Virtualization

You may have heard about one or two of our favorite global financial customers, the rocket scientists, or a global telco, doing fantastic things with VM workloads on OpenShift.

We’re now able to share one of our largest success stories from Sahibinden, who has been in production for almost a year!

OpenShift Virtualization at scale

Sahibinden transformed their entire applications platform from their previous traditional virtualization solution, to a large-scale OpenShift bare metal cluster with OpenShift Virtualization and OpenShift Data Foundation. This is a textbook proof point that customers can architect, deploy, and operate business critical workloads on bare metal; it was an amazing collaboration between Sahibinden and Red Hat. They transformed their existing infrastructure to a more modern, scalable and reliable hybrid platform, while improving and accelerated IT service delivery to enhance developer experience. Without giving too many spoilers, listen to the Sahibinden team describe their accomplishments, from the OpenShift Commons Gathering on Databases on February 23, 2022.

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Sahibinden improves their scalability, flexibility and reusability with a unified compute platform.

What’s New

Easier administration and greater observability

Enhanced virtual machine workflow management

OpenShift provides a combined view and operations around containers, virtual machines and serverless workloads. For those who exclusively manage VMs, we’ve improved the overall admin experience by providing top consumers overview, detailed VM statistics, and aggregate views.

 Gain insight into your virtualized workloads

If you deploy RHEL guests, you can be sure you deploy the latest version by automatically updating the base image for your VM templates.

Service mesh support for virtual machines

We’ve extended support for VMs with Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh with the same security, observability, and traffic management features as any other application or pods.

Ready for your critical workloads

Additional hybrid cloud footprint support

To provide platform consistency and the ability to run the same workloads in both public clouds and on-premises, we currently offer OpenShift Virtualization on AWS bare metal instances as a tech preview feature. This release adds a tech preview for IBM Cloud bare metal instances. We continue to collaborate with additional cloud vendors based on customer needs.

Sharing is better [vGPU tech preview]

Virtualized applications on OpenShift can now share GPU resources. The vGPU feature slices a single GPU into multiple instances, enabling all kinds of GPU workloads from desktops to AI/ML and onwards.

Smaller is better

For edge deployments with single node OpenShift deployments, we’ve optimized resource consumption, allowing for a smaller footprint in constrained deployments.

Enterprise capabilities for all

Enhanced data protection

To simplify data protection, this release integrates VMs with the OpenShift API for Data Protection (upstream Velero) for backup and restore. Disaster recovery workflows will be coordinated with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management. We’re collaborating with our ecosystem partners to provide a comprehensive solution; we’ll share availability as soon as it’s ready.

Migration into OpenShift Virtualization at scale

It’s easy to bring your existing VMs in OpenShift through the Red Hat Migration Toolkits. OpenShift Virtualization currently supports warm migration from VMware and cold migration from RHV. With this release you are able to do warm migration of workloads from RHV, allowing efficient cutovers with minimal downtime. In a future release, you’ll also be able to migrate VMs from OpenStack into OpenShift.

And for your Microsoft Windows workloads

All versions of OpenShift are validated in Microsoft Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP), ensuring full support of Windows guests by Red Hat and Microsoft.

Summary

OpenShift 4.10 with OpenShift Virtualization 4.10 continues our aggressive delivery of capabilities for all of your virtualized application workloads. It enables customers to accelerate their modernization and adoption of cloud-native technologies using GitOps principles, while ensuring VM based applications can continue to run the business.

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The Level Up Hour (E59) | Container and VM hybrid workloads

OpenShift Virtualization is included at no additional cost with all OpenShift subscriptions: OpenShift Kubernetes Engine, OpenShift Container Platform, or OpenShift Platform Plus.

There are specific offerings for on-premises bare metal deployments of OpenShift. Additionally, OpenShift includes entitlement for unlimited RHEL guests, making the economics of migration from other virtualization platforms more enticing

Learn more about this OpenShift Virtualization release in OpenShift Virtualization Release Notes. You can see the bigger picture in the What’s New in Red Hat OpenShift 4.10.

Find Out More

Upstream Project and Community

Red Hat initiated and continues to be a leading contributor to KubeVirt, the upstream CNCF project that users and vendors are adopting to integrate virtual machines in Kubernetes. We are also seeing additional companies choosing KubeVirt as a proven key technology. Our upstream-first approach keeps everything open, secure, and stable for even your most challenging enterprise workloads.

See what’s coming next in the upstream project at KubeVirt Summit - February 2022


About the author

Peter is a product manager in Cloud Platforms, focused on virtualization. He has been in high tech for storage, virtualization, databases, and hyperconverged solutions for longer than he cares to admit.

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