New development is shifting to containers, and increasingly serverless as well, but organizations also have a huge investment in applications that run as virtual machines, many of which provide vital services to new and existing containerized applications. OpenShift Virtualization (formerly container-native virtualization) lets developers bring virtual machines (VMs) into containerized workflows by running a virtual machine within a container where they can develop, manage, and deploy virtual machines side-by-side with containers and serverless all in one platform. A feature of OpenShift Container Platform, OpenShift Virtualization combines two technologies into a single management platform so organizations take advantage of the simplicity and speed of containers and Kubernetes while still benefiting from the applications and services that have been architected for virtual machines.
OpenShift Virtualization acknowledges that many organizations are using both container and virtual machine technologies today and delivers an efficient process to manage both in one centralized platform.
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KubeVirt is the open source project that makes it possible to run virtual machines in a Kubernetes-managed container platform. KubeVirt delivers container-native virtualization by leveraging KVM, the Linux Kernel hypervisor, within a Kubernetes container. KubeVirt provides services like those associated with traditional virtualization platforms, providing the best of both mature virtualization management technology and Kubernetes container orchestration.
Started by Red Hat, KubeVirt is now a CNCF Sandbox project. Red Hat is one of the leading contributors to the Kubernetes ecosystem, and builder of key features such as StatefulSets, role-based access control (RBAC), and Network Policy, as well as critical components of Kubernetes, including etcd (the cornerstone of Kubernetes that maintains cluster configuration).
Making virtualization Kubernetes-native
Learn more:
OpenShift Virtualization: Containers, KVM, and your VMs
Getting started with KubeVirt containers and virtual machines together
Deploy a virtual machine with KubeVirt
OpenShift Virtualization is an operator that enables developers to create and add virtualized applications to their projects from OperatorHub in the same way they would for a containerized application. The resulting virtual machines will run in parallel on the same Red Hat OpenShift nodes as traditional application containers.
OpenShift Virtualization adds new objects to your OpenShift Container Platform cluster via Kubernetes custom resources to enable virtualization tasks. These tasks include:
OpenShift Virtualization enables businesses to deliver a platform to:
OpenShift Virtualization is ideal for teams that are shifting to cloud-native application development and have a large investment in conventional virtual machine technology.
Learn more: Modernize your application infrastructure with virtual machines in containers.
Install OpenShift Virtualization
Red Hat Summit 2020: OpenShift Virtualization - A simplified, converged management platform for virtual machines and containers
Get started: deploying and using OpenShift Virtualization