Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine, a new edition of Red Hat OpenShift that provides a dedicated way for organizations to access the proven virtualization functionality already available within Red Hat OpenShift. Focused exclusively on virtualization workloads, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine provides a tailored option for deploying, managing and scaling virtual machines (VMs), removing features unrelated to VM management. This ensures organizations can maximize the value of OpenShift Virtualization while aligning with their specific infrastructure needs.

While containerization may have shifted how virtual machines are used for certain applications, VMs remain a critical tool in IT infrastructure. However, with the virtualization market experiencing significant changes in recent years, many organizations face uncertainty and rising costs when it comes to managing their virtualization infrastructure.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine delivers a cost-efficient virtualization-only solution for deploying, managing and scaling virtual machines.

Redefined virtualization through a streamlined approach
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine helps maximize the value of these investments by entitling only essential OpenShift features and components required for virtualization, delivering simplified operations and improved efficiency. Powered by Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and the KVM hypervisor used across the enterprise datacenter and cloud, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine is able to run on on-premises hardware that supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and on supported bare metal cloud services including AWS bare metal instances. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine scales to meet workload demands while providing built-in security capabilities and more consistent performance across the hybrid cloud.

To ease migration efforts, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine includes access to Red Hat's intuitive migration tool - the migration toolkit for virtualization - that assists organizations in transitioning from other virtualization platforms, simplifying the migration workflow and helping to reduce downtime while driving greater operational continuity. Red Hat also offers a Virtualization Migration Assessment, an interactive workshop with Red Hat experts that will assess an organization's business drivers, current state and the path to low risk VM migration. Additionally, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine integrates with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform enabling IT teams to automate VM migrations at scale, along with day-to-day VM management tasks. With Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, organizations can automate and orchestrate across their virtualized environments and other areas of IT for more efficient, resilient and consistent operations at scale.

Additionally, the Red Hat partner ecosystem is well-positioned to support Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine with capabilities like storage solutions, extensive backup and disaster recovery options and networking tools to streamline deployments and scale to modern IT needs.

To unify virtual machine management at scale and limit sprawl, Red Hat is also introducing Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization. This new edition of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes provides focused access to Advanced Cluster Management's existing features designed to centralize VM lifecycle management and streamline tasks such as VM provisioning, monitoring and day-to-day compliance, while maintaining greater consistency across an organization's virtualized estate.

"Virtualization solutions are in the bedrock of most private and public cloud environments. As organizations look to modernize their virtual environments to meet the demands of today's IT climate, we have found that no two organizations are at the same point in their virtualization journey. This causes diversity in the approaches they want to take with the solutions Red Hat provides. Red Hat needed to change how we were offering our virtualization solution to accommodate organizations that wanted to use only the Red Hat OpenShift product features focused on virtualization. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine and Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization allow Red Hat to significantly lower the price point of the solution to meet those users where they are in their modernization efforts." -- Mike Barrett, vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud Platforms, Red Hat

Availability

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization are now available.