Kathy Gibson reports from Red Hat Summit in Johannesburg – Just a couple of years ago, few would have believed that virtualisation would be a pressing topic in 2024.
“But virtualisation is back on the agenda – and it’s bigger than ever,” says Bruce Busansky, application platform specialist at Red Hat. “And this issue is causing our customers to have some difficult conversations.”
The biggest issue that customers are facing is a big increase in virtualisation costs, says Busansky. In some instances, these have increased by three-, five- and even 10-fold.
“At the same time, they are battling with budget cuts and taking money from innovation or staffing just to keep the lights on, which adds to their risk profile,” he says.
Busansky points out that Red Hat is not very well-known as a virtualisation vendor, but actually has a 17-year history in the technology.
The company acquired a small virtualisation company, KVM, in 2007 which ultimately resulted in the launch of Open Stack and KubeVirt – an open source community that enabled virtual machine management on Kubernetes.
In 2020, the company launched Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation, a unified platform for virtual machines and containers.
Busansky explains that OpenShift it is a single platform, addressed through a single API, with a standard set of instructions and operations that contributes to simplified operations. And a vibrant open source community means a lot of customers are already benefiting from the ecosystem.
OpenShift Virtualisation is a capability included in the box with OpenShift. Red Hat virtual machines are included at no extra cost, while Windows virtual machines are well integrated.
As a modern virtualisation platform, in includes new constructs like Kubernetes, and the ability to apply all OpenShift tools to virtual machines.
“We are turning this out as the modern application platform that integrates teams and drives cost-efficient operations,” Busansky says. “The goal is a trusted and modern AI + MLOps platform that offers a choice of models and gives you faster time to production.”
Ease of migration is important, Busansky adds, and customers report that the Red Hat migration platform is easy to use and effective. A reference architecture is also available for Dell Technologies environments; and migrating workloads to the cloud is also available as a managed service in AWS.
Red Hat and its partners can work with customers to understand what their current environment is and perform a virtualisation migration assessment that outlines what they need to do to make the move.