Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization runs virtual machines on the same OpenShift cluster that runs containers, managed through the same interface, the same access controls and the same operational tooling. It is included as a feature of OpenShift rather than sold as a separate hypervisor product.

Unifying the two workload types is the entire point, and it addresses a specific stage of the migration problem. Most organisations moving toward containers still run a large estate of virtual machines that will not be rewritten soon, and maintaining two platforms with two teams and two operational models is expensive. Bringing virtual machines onto the container platform means one cluster, one set of policies and one skill set, while the applications inside those virtual machines are modernised on their own timetable or left alone.

Because the virtual machines run as workloads on Kubernetes, they inherit the platform's scheduling, networking, storage and role based access control rather than needing parallel equivalents. That is what makes the consolidation real rather than cosmetic, since an operator applies one network policy and it covers both a container and a virtual machine.

The commercial context is that many organisations are reconsidering their virtualization platform after licensing changes elsewhere in the market, and Red Hat positions OpenShift Virtualization directly at that migration. Reserved instances of OpenShift are advertised from as little as 0.076 dollars an hour on a three year contract.