Depending on the specific use case, both containers and virtual machines (VMs) can serve as optimal platforms for different types of applications. Therefore, many organizations run some of their workloads on containers and some on VMs. Often, this leads organizations to face additional challenges by having to manage separate platforms: a hypervisor for VMs and a container orchestrator for applications.

To address this challenge, Red Hat introduced OpenShift Virtualization (formerly known as Container Native Virtualization) starting from OpenShift version 4.6. The OpenShift Virtualization feature enables you to run and manage virtual machines alongside containers on the same OpenShift Container Platform installation, providing hybrid management capability to automate deployment and management of VMs through operators. In addition to creating VMs in OpenShift, with OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat also supports importing VMs from VMware vSphere, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat OpenStack Platform deployments.

Certain features like live VM migration, VM disk cloning, VM snapshots and so on are also supported by OpenShift Virtualization with assistance from Astra Trident when backed by NetApp ONTAP. Examples of each of these workflows are discussed later in this document in their respective sections.

To learn more about Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, see the documentation here.