We are happy to announce that Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization 4.12 is now generally available.  With key collaboration from the upstream KubeVirt community, OpenShift Virtualization 4.12 provides new security capabilities, greater observability and improvements that make managing VMs on OpenShift a smoother experience.

OpenShift Virtualization allows you to modernize operations with declarative infrastructure, versioned and immutable deployment and continuous test automation on a unified platform.  This helps ensure that your infrastructure is always up to date, reducing time you spend firefighting production issues.

Customer Momentum Continues

Customers have solved challenging virtualization infrastructure problems and realized benefits running VM workloads on OpenShift since our GA with OpenShift 4.5. At this year’s Red Hat Summit, the Israeli Ministry of Defense and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will share their success. Morgan Stanley, also continues their journey with OpenShift as a unified platform in their rigorously regulated environment.

Upcoming Red Hat Summit Sessions - May 23- 25, 2023

Israeli Ministry of Defense offers private cloud services using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Center of Computing and Information Systems, or Mamram, selected OpenShift as the new internal cloud solution, to run both VMs and containers on a unified platform with a single coherent API.

NOAA- Safely navigating storm clouds with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization 

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to analyze weather data to help pilots know when it's safe to fly and when to alert the public of upcoming tornado and flood situations. With over 150 clusters deployed from Guam, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, their work preserves and even saves lives.

Kubernetes Operational Excellence with GitOps using OCP, RHACM and AAP at Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley needed to meet rigid security and resiliency requirements while respecting legacy services. Their modern application platform enables developer innovation with effective management of regulatory and operational risks. At production scale, a small number of engineers deploy new features with consistency and adherence to investment banking [security] standards.

OpenShift Virtualization 4.12 new features

Modernization strategies require organizations to continuously embrace architecture that provide more integrated security and compliance features. New enhancements available in OpenShift Virtualization 4.12 are designed to help organizations adopt a modern platform while mitigating risks.

New features to better secure your workloads

We’ve made it easier to access virtual machine consoles via SSH with a single click.

For an admin to build zero-trust networking, you need to limit ingress and egress traffic on secondary networks, this is done with a CIDR-based network filtering Container Network Interface (CNI).

For workloads that require more isolation, we’ve extended sandboxed containers to other platforms with a Developer Preview on AWS.

Protect and share data

We’re collaborating with our ecosystem partners like Kasten by Veeam to protect new workloads with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

You can now transfer VMs between clusters with VM export, saving time and effort by creating workloads like databases in dev environments, and export copies for use in your test clusters.

Administer with ease

OpenShift Virtualization gives you complete control of all application components; VMs, containers, and serverless, on a single platform. Successful management of your platform can be bolstered through utilization of administrative and observability features.

We added a “top consumers'' view to the virtualization overview, which shows which workloads are consuming the most CPU, memory, and disk I/O. This lets you keep an eye on things, and quickly troubleshoot noisy neighbor problems.

Sometimes when things don’t go as expected, like a VM not starting, it can be a challenge to untangle what is cause and what is effect. So when faced with an odd alert, and you scratch your head, "What does CDINotReady mean"?, you look it up in the OpenShift Virtualization runbooks. Each runbook defines an alert and provides steps to diagnose and resolve the issue, reducing your time to fix.

We also reduced false alerts that might happen during upgrades.

Observe what’s important

In addition to enhancing the cluster and VM health monitoring dashboards, we’ve given more visibility into live migrations.  You can see how frequently workloads are moving, and how much bandwidth is being consumed. If any live migrations are stuck, you can drill into the details about why it may not be progressing. You can also build your own dashboard with new live migration metrics.

More cloud like capabilities

To automate the VM lifecycle, you want to manage virtual machines with OpenShift Pipelines. This gives you declarative control over how VMs are built, provisioned, and deployed. We included some example OpenShift Pipelines Tekton Reference Pipeline for VMs to get you started.

As OpenShift adds exciting capabilities for on-premise deployments, we have integrated VMs to take advantage of MetalLB load balancing by
creating a service to expose a virtual machine

Ready for your critical workloads

To help you scale your infrastructure, our performance engineering team has distilled our knowledge to optimize your infrastructure in the OpenShift Virtualization - Tuning & Scaling Guide.

We’ve gained this knowledge by scaling up and scaling out up to 10,000 VMs in a single cluster, as proven in the OpenShift Virtualization with Red Hat Ceph Storage 5 large scale reference architecture.

We’ve also validated the latest releases of Microsoft Windows Server 2022 and Windows 11. 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.

Ecosystem partners prove our platform

We’ve also been collaborating with our partners to prove OpenShift performs and scales on their platforms. An example is Lenovo’s Reference Architecture: OpenShift on Lenovo ThinkSystem, ThinkEdge and ThinkAgile HX Servers

Summary

OpenShift Virtualization 4.12 continues our demonstrated ability 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.

Are you wanting to learn more?

You can attend an Red Hat Summit 2023 OpenShift Virtualization Lab - migrate, integrate with front end cloud native app, taught by our technical ninja and host of Ask an OpenShift Admin, Andrew Sullivan @practicalandrew

Training courses and certifications

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


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 4.12.

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 ensures everything is open, secure, and stable for even your most challenging enterprise workloads.

Explore the upstream innovation from the KubeVirt 2023 Summit.


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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