By Carol Platz, VP and Tech Evangelist at Lightbits Labs
The virtualization strategies that many enterprises relied on for decades are suddenly under pressure. In the wake of VMware’s changes, virtualization teams are revisiting deeply ingrained data infrastructure assumptions. For many, that means accelerating containerization modernization initiatives. Red Hat OpenShift is increasingly seen as the most viable modernization platform that also supports Virtual Machines (VMs).
But migrating VM workloads is only part of the story. Many existing storage architectures, designed for a different era, aren’t equipped to support container-native workloads at scale. Once deployments ramp up, new challenges emerge. For instance, persistent storage volume provisioning gets complicated, cost-efficiency is compromised, performance and scale can suffer, and inevitably modernization and DevOps pipelines begin to stall.
These are not isolated issues. At Lightbits, we’ve worked with enterprises and service providers deploying OpenShift, and our software-defined storage solution is consistently proving to be the answer for successful modernization of high-performance block workloads.
Here are five key lessons from the front lines of virtualization modernization.
1. Storage Must Be Designed for the Demands of Container-Native Workloads
Container workloads introduce demands that traditional storage platforms weren’t designed for. Dynamic provisioning of thousands of persistent volume claims (PVCs), short-lived microservices that generate unpredictable I/O, and the concurrent use of containers and VMs all create pressures that static, monolithic storage systems struggle to manage.
What’s needed is a storage architecture that can deliver consistent IOPS and low latency even under volatile, mixed-workload condition. In production environments, we’ve seen that architectural agility, such as disaggregated, software-defined storage with Kubernetes-native integration, plays a far greater role in OpenShift success than raw throughput alone.
Lightbits Labs’ disaggregated, software-defined block storage is specifically designed for these container-native demands, offering seamless OpenShift and Kubernetes integrations and delivering consistent IOPS and low latency even under volatile, mixed-workload conditions.
2. Live Migration Has to Be Fast, Seamless, and Reliable
As organizations use KubeVirt to migrate VM workloads into OpenShift, storage becomes a critical enabler or blocker. Live migration is no longer optional but expected. But for many teams, the reality involves performance dips, complex scripting, or limitations tied to their underlying storage.
Through our collaboration with OpenShift, we’ve found that streamlining live migration, especially for VMs with multiple attached volumes, depends on storage systems that treat container and VM I/O symmetrically and avoid bottlenecks during movement. Without that foundation, migrations tend to create more problems than they solve. For more information on enabling live VM migrations in OpenShift, read the Red Hat blog High-performance storage for OpenShift Virtualization: A review of Lightbits Labs.
Lightbits Labs’ block storage natively designed with NVMe over TCP ensures fast, seamless, and reliable live migrations, even for VMs with multiple attached volumes, by treating container and VM I/O symmetrically and eliminating bottlenecks during movement.
3. Multi-Tenancy and Data Security Are Non-Negotiable
OpenShift is used in diverse settings: global enterprises, managed service providers, and telcos. In every case, secure multi-tenancy is a baseline requirement. But enforcing QoS, encryption, and access control policies at scale is often easier said than done.
Lightbits Labs’ block storage natively integrates end-to-end encryption, policy-based access controls, multi-tenancy for mixed workloads, and seamless role mapping, all exposed through familiar OpenShift tooling, ensuring a secure posture without sacrificing operational speed.
4. Flexibility Is No Longer a Bonus
The pace of data infrastructure innovation is relentless, and being forced to a particular architecture that quickly becomes outdated can hinder growth. One team might be modernizing legacy virtualized apps while another is building out real-time AI workloads and supporting that diversity with a single storage approach used to mean trade-offs. Increasingly, that’s no longer acceptable.
We’ve seen organizations succeed when their storage lets them scale compute and storage independently, sidestep overprovisioning, and avoid hardware lock-in. Lightbits Labs’ block storage, built on NVMe/TCP and running on commodity x86 servers, provides the essential flexibility to scale compute and storage independently, prevent overprovisioning, and avoid hardware lock-in, empowering organizations to adapt rapidly to changing workload requirements and without requiring a rethink of the architecture every year.
5. Cost Efficiency Isn’t Just About Savings
With budgets under pressure, teams can’t afford to over-provision servers to satisfy predictable workload performance requirements they don’t need or spend months tuning systems that won’t scale. OpenShift storage that balances high performance with efficient resource use isn’t a “nice to have, but what makes them viable long-term.
This is especially true for organizations transitioning away from traditional virtualization platforms. Every dollar spent on replacing VMware licensing or simplifying infrastructure must yield measurable and sustainable benefits.
Lightbits Labs’ block storage delivers exceptional cost efficiency by balancing high performance with efficient resource utilization, ensuring OpenShift environments are viable long-term, particularly for organizations transitioning from traditional virtualization.
Platform Choices Are Just the Beginning
OpenShift adoption is often framed as a platform shift. However, in practice, it serves as a catalyst for a much more profound transformation: rethinking how teams build, test, run, and scale applications. In this context, Lightbits Labs’ block storage assumes outsized importance as a foundational element, transforming the storage layer from a potential bottleneck into a source of agility for modern OpenShift deployments.
Modernization isn’t just about moving off legacy platforms but about removing friction across the stack. And storage, when re-architected for the cloud-native era, becomes a source of agility, not a constraint.
For organizations on this path, aligning storage to OpenShift isn’t an afterthought. It’s a prerequisite for realizing the full value of their transformation.
To learn more about high-performance block storage for OpenShift Virtualization from Lightbits Labs, the inventors of NVMe over TCP, read my blog: Comparing OpenShift Storage Solutions: Which One Fits Your Virtualization Needs?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carol Platz brings over 25 years of technology evangelism and marketing leadership for high-performance data storage solutions to her role as vice president of marketing at Lightbits. Prior to joining the company, she directed marketing for storage startups like WekaIO, Cloudian, and Panasas. In addition, she led strategic product teams for large enterprise companies like Western Digital Corp., systems and emerging cloud infrastructure products, and SGI. Carol holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Northeastern Illinois University, an MBA from Santa Clara University, and is an alumnus of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her civic and social responsibility activities have included volunteering at the Humane Society of Silicon Valley and fundraising for the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. She resides in Northern California and enjoys the great outdoors, fishing, boating, and hiking. She is also an avid reader and lifelong learner.
