Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.5, the latest version of the industry's most comprehensive Kubernetes platform. Red Hat OpenShift 4.5, which includes the general availability of OpenShift Virtualization, is designed to help organizations break down application barriers between traditional and cloud-native infrastructure and extend control over distributed resources.

According to Gartner, "By 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 30% in 2019." While this report indicates that cloud-native applications are the future of business innovation and the focus of new application development, many organizations still have large investments in business-critical applications that run as traditional virtual machines (VMs). Red Hat OpenShift now includes OpenShift Virtualization, a new platform feature that enables IT organizations to bring standard VM-based workloads to Kubernetes, helping eliminate the workflow and development silos that typically exist between traditional and cloud-native application stacks.

Breaking down walls between cloud-native and traditional workloads

First introduced at Red Hat Summit 2020 as a technology preview feature, OpenShift Virtualization is now generally available and included with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform at no additional cost. Derived from the KubeVirt open source project, OpenShift Virtualization enables organizations to develop, deploy and manage applications consisting of VMs alongside containers and serverless functions, all in one modern Kubernetes platform running on bare-metal infrastructure. With OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat brings traditional application stacks forward into a layer of open innovation, enabling customers to truly transform at their own speed.

By bringing new and existing applications to the same architecture, OpenShift Virtualization provides a consistent development experience and turbocharges an organization's ability to deliver quickly on innovation. Once VMs are migrated to and managed by Red Hat OpenShift, they can be containerized over time, or be maintained as virtual machines. This allows users to develop and deliver hybrid applications built on containers and VMs to run side-by-side on the same platform.

Increased flexibility and choice for underlying infrastructure

Red Hat OpenShift 4.5 also introduces full-stack automation for VMware vSphere deployments, making it "push-button" easy to deploy Red Hat OpenShift on top of all currently supported vSphere environments. With full-stack automation, the administrator only needs to provide credentials to a vSphere deployment, and the installer provisions all of the resources needed, enabling a faster initial setup experience and easier ongoing management and maintenance. This adds to OpenShift's existing support for VMware vSphere deployments on pre-existing infrastructure, which provides administrators the flexibility to deploy OpenShift in highly customized vSphere environments.

Over time, the full-stack automation installation experience has expanded to include AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat OpenStack Platform, allowing customers to deploy OpenShift clusters across different clouds and on-premises with the same fully automated experience. Now with the ability to fully automate vSphere deployments, Red Hat makes it easier for organizations to run an enterprise container platform on existing virtual infrastructure, providing organizations even more choice when it comes to their underlying infrastructure platform.

Customer success on Red Hat OpenShift

More than 2,000 customers globally use Red Hat OpenShift to power cloud-native infrastructure, from those that are just beginning to explore the benefits of containerized applications to organizations delivering cloud-native enterprise applications into production. More than just a powerful, scalable and flexible platform to digitally transform existing workloads, OpenShift also provides a launchpad for next-generation applications like AI/ML, data services and analytics, edge computing and more. Industry leaders like BrianzAcque, Condis Supermercats, Edenor, ExxonMobil and Lotte Card are among the global organizations using Red Hat OpenShift to underpin their cloud-native strategies to not only digitally transform their operations but also differentiate their services in increasingly competitive markets.

Availability

Red Hat OpenShift 4.5 is now generally available. OpenShift Virtualization is available within the OpenShift console as a supported operator in the Operator Hub.