Red Hat, Inc. announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.18, the
latest version of the industry's leading hybrid cloud application
platform powered by Kubernetes. Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 introduces new
features and capabilities designed to streamline operations and security
across IT environments and deliver greater consistency to all
applications, from cloud-native and AI-enabled to virtualized and
traditional.
According to the Gartner press release Top Trends Impacting Infrastructure and Operations for 2025,
revirtualization/devirtualization is one of the top I&O trends for
2025. In our opinion, as shifts in the virtualization market require
organizations to reevaluate their virtualized infrastructure and
strategies, for many it is an opportunity to implement technologies that
will both deliver on their current IT requirements as well as help them
meet the needs of tomorrow. The latest enhancements to Red Hat
OpenShift are designed to simplify the management of virtual machines and containers while providing organizations with a common infrastructure to bring their generative AI (gen AI) plans to life.
Enhanced virtualization experience
Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 introduces new virtualization enhancements that
improve networking, simplify storage migration, and streamline VM
management. These updates reduce operational complexity, enhance
flexibility and improve resource efficiency -- making it easier to
manage and adapt virtualized environments as needs evolve.
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VM-friendly networking provides support for common VM networking
use cases with the general availability of user-defined networks, making
it easier for users to get their virtualization platform up and
running. Also available with OpenShift on AWS and Red Hat OpenShift
Service on AWS, this allows users to have similar networking
capabilities for secondary networks on AWS as they do on-premises,
allowing for more hybrid cloud flexibility.
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VM storage migration, available as a technology preview, now includes additional enhancements that allow
for non-disruptive movement of data between storage devices and storage
classes while a VM is running, enabling users to be more agile as
storage needs change.
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Tree-view navigation, available as a technology preview, enables
users to logically group VMs into folders which allows for a more
granular grouping. Additionally, with logical grouping, also available as a technology preview, users have a quicker and easier way to navigate between VMs using a single click.
Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 also enhances user-defined networks with Border Gateway Protocol (BGP),
which improves segmentation and supports advanced use cases like VM
static IP assignment, live migration and stronger multi-tenancy.
Extending choice for greater hybrid cloud innovation
Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 expands support to additional public cloud
providers, providing users with increased flexibility for how and where
they choose to run their workloads. Red Hat OpenShift now supports
bare-metal deployments on Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Additionally, for users looking for virtualization in the public cloud,
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is now available on Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure as a technology preview.
Simplified operations for security
Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 introduces new security features designed to help
drive more resilient operations while decreasing potential risks. Secret store container storage interface (CSI) driver is
now generally available and provides users with a vendor-agnostic
solution for managing credentials and sensitive information for
applications. Workloads on Red Hat OpenShift can access external secrets
managers without storing secrets on the cluster, enhancing overall
security hygiene and simplifying credential management. This allows for
clusters to remain unaware of secrets, thereby further reducing risk.
Additionally, Secret Store CSI Driver enhances complementary solutions,
such as OpenShift GitOps and OpenShift Pipelines, by enabling them to
consume secrets from an external secrets manager in a more secure way.
Availability
Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 is now generally available.