Experience Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization: A Modern Application Platform for Virtual Machines

OpenShift Virtualization enables you to bring virtual machines onto a modern, Kubernetes-based infrastructure. It enables the development and delivery of new applications as well as the modernization of existing ones and can create applications that consist of virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions - all managed together using Kubernetes-native tools and paradigms.

This lab is a condensed version of our OpenShift Virtualization Roadshow, which we encourage you to attend in a city near you for a more in depth hands-on experience with all the functions of OpenShift Virtualization.

In this lab, we will focus primarily on Day 2 management activities that many virtual administrators may encounter in their day to day workflows.

Who Will Benefit Most from this Lab?

Virtual Machine Administrators — Those responsible for day to day management of virtual guests in OpenShift Virtualization. These users will often find themselves responsible for provisioning virtual guests, and day to day management of the guests, and the applications running within.

Virtual Infrastructure Administrators — Those responsible for the physical infrastructure hosting the OpenShift Virtualization solution. These users will be responsible for physical hardware, storage, and networking changes to the environment, that will affect the day to day operations of the running virtual machines.

What Content Is Covered In This Lab?

These are the six main sections that will be covered:

  • Virtual Machine Management: In this section we will provide a review of virtual machine management fundamentals, including creating a virtual machine, and modifying it’s allotted resources.

  • Bare Metal Infrastructure Management: In this section, an administrator will learn how to scale their OpenShift environment by adding in an additional worker node to host virtualized workloads.

  • Storage Management: The storage paradigm familiar to many administrators changes with OpenShift Virtualization, this section will explore many actions related to storage management for VMs.

  • Network Management: By default VMs are connected to the pod network in OpenShift, in this section we will explore creating new L2 network mappings, and configuring policies for multiple networks.

  • Template Management: In order to streamline deployment of virtual machines, administrators will often create templates to ease deployment operations. This section will focus on that process.

  • Migrating Virtual Machines: In this section, we will use the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV) to migrate a VM from an existing VMware vSphere environment to OpenShift Virtualization.

What is OpenShift Virtualization?

  • OpenShift Virtualization is a feature of Red Hat OpenShift; it is not an add-on or a separate product and is included with all entitlements.

  • All current and future subscribers receive OpenShift Virtualization as part of their OpenShift subscription. It has been generally available since OpenShift 4.5.

  • OpenShift Virtualization is based on the “container-native virtualization” technology being developed upstream under the KubeVirt project, a sandbox project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

  • It leverages the Red Hat Enterprise Linux KVM hypervisor (RHEL KVM), which is a mature and highly performant open-source hypervisor used by many organizations and cloud service providers globally and which has been under development for over 15 years.

  • OpenShift Virtualization leverages the RHEL KVM hypervisor and allows the VM to be managed by Kubernetes and KubeVirt. An OpenShift Virtualization VM uses Kubernetes scheduling, network, and storage infrastructure.

  • OpenShift Virtualization includes entitlements for unlimited virtual RHEL guests. Guest licensing for other supported operating systems will need to be purchased separately.

  • OpenShift Virtualization is SVVP certified with Microsoft for Windows guest support per the same rules that apply to Red Hat’s other KVM virtualization offerings.

  • OpenShift Virtualization is currently only supported on bare metal physical servers, typically on-premises or through dedicated hosting. Support for other topologies (OpenShift deployed on virtualized infrastructure like RHV or vSphere) is not available at this time.

  • Support for AWS / ROSA has already been announced, and we are in the process of adding support for OpenShift Virtualization in additional Managed OpenShift Cloud services.

  • OpenShift Virtualization allows OpenShift to deploy, manage, and connect virtual machines to an OpenShift cluster. This includes the ability to connect to and manage those VMs using Kubernetes-native methods and take advantage of OpenShift features like Pipelines, GitOps, Service Mesh, and more.

Why switch from a traditional VM platform?

Adopt cloud-native development and/or cloud-native operations: Red Hat OpenShift helps your team build applications with speed, agility, confidence, and choice. Code in production mode, anywhere you choose to build. Get back to doing work that matters.

Complete app dev stack: Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces (formerly Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces), Runtimes, Integration and Process Automation, Serverless, Pipelines, and more with security throughout.

Shift infrastructure spend to innovation: OpenShift native architecture changes the heavyweight cost structure from SDDC legacy to lightweight container-native frameworks.

Risk mitigation: With OpenShift support for on-premises and public cloud options, OpenShift is insurance against public cloud lock-in.

Independent from infrastructure: Red Hat OpenShift runs consistently on bare metal, on-premises virtualization, or public cloud for ultimate choice and flexibility of deployment and updates.

Pure open source innovation: The innovation in Kubernetes, serverless, service mesh, Kubernetes Operators, and more powered by the velocity of open source, with Red Hat in the lead.

Next steps

If you would like to learn more about OpenShift Virtualization, please visit the landing page, review the documentation, or view some of our demo videos on YouTube.

Requirements for the Lab Environment

  • Participant needs to have their own computer with browser and internet access.

  • Chromium based browser is recommended, some copy/paste functions don’t work in Firefox for the time being.

  • Remote access console uses the US keyboard layout by default, so it’s good to know where special characters reside for other country’s layouts, or to use the copy/paste function in a supported browser.

Credentials for the OpenShift Console

Your OpenShift cluster console is available {openshift_web_console}[here^].

Administrator login is available with:

  • User: {openshift_admin_user}

  • Password: {openshift_admin_password}

Bastion Access

A RHEL bastion host is available with common utilities pre-installed and OpenShift command line access pre-configured.

For SSH access to the bastion execute the following:

sudo ssh root@192.168.123.100

vCenter Access

In the migration chapter of the lab, you will be asked to login and examine a VMware vSphere environment.

For access, please use the following credentials:

  • vcenter_user: {vcenter_user}

  • vcenter_password: {vcenter_password}