Red Hat releases improvements for OpenShift virtualization

Red Hat, Inc., the open source solutions provider, recently announced new features and enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift, the industry-leading Kubernetes-based hybrid cloud application platform, as well as the general availability of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service. The new features, delivered with the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.16, are designed to help organizations more easily develop, connect, and improve the security of disparate workloads for a more consistent experience across applications and environments.

Red Hat simplifies workload diversity in the hybrid cloud with the latest version of Red Hat OpenShift 4.16

“The ability to modernize both infrastructure and applications faster is a critical capability to better meet customer needs – but it doesn't happen overnight. As organizations make technology decisions to support their AI strategies, both for today and tomorrow, they need platforms that position them for future success while meeting the needs of their legacy applications and environments. With Red Hat OpenShift 4.16, organizations can focus on both incremental improvements and modernization. Red Hat OpenShift helps customers prepare their infrastructure for the needs of AI while managing and maintaining traditional, mission-critical applications and infrastructure such as virtualized environments – all from a single platform,” said Mike Barrett, vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud Platforms, Red Hat.

Delivering better experiences and improving customer satisfaction are at the heart of most organizations' IT goals. To do this, they often turn to intelligent apps, including both AI-powered applications and edge applications that enable insights to be delivered faster, wherever they are needed. The technology decisions made today around these and other applications often support organizations' preparation for an AI and edge-focused future. However, simply adopting the latest AI technology is not enough, as these systems and platforms must also run in harmony with critical traditional applications and infrastructure, such as virtualized environments.

The latest enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift are designed to help organizations connect their disparate, diverse workloads and create a more unified management and deployment experience – no matter where an application resides in the hybrid cloud and whether the application is a traditional work device or designed to leverage AI innovations.

OpenShift Virtualization Extensions: A Modern Option for Virtualization

As the virtualization landscape continues to evolve, many organizations are looking to migrate existing virtualized workloads to a platform that can run virtual machines (VMs) alongside modern containerized applications and serverless functions, with the ability to modernize those VM-based applications as needed. Red Hat now offers a virtualization migration assessment directly and through its partners that walks organizations through a risk assessment methodology to determine the best path to migrate from a legacy virtualization solution.

The latest enhancements in Red Hat OpenShift for virtualization use cases further simplify the migration and modernization of virtualized workloads. New features include:

• Metro Disaster Recovery provides regional disaster recovery for virtual machines (VMs) that use storage provisioned on Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation in conjunction with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes for management.
• Hot-Add CPU provides users with the ability to declaratively add additional vCPU resources to a running VM to improve memory density with safe memory overcommitment and more easily scale VMs with CPU hotplug.
• Monitoring multi-cluster virtualization with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management enables users to view all VMs across multiple Red Hat OpenShift clusters and collect and more quickly generate reports for the VMs.
  

Improving the customer experience at the edge

Minimizing service downtime is paramount to providing customers with a high-quality experience, and is especially important for applications at the edge. To improve service quality at the edge, Red Hat OpenShift 4.16 introduces a “Shift Left” approach with image-based updates (IBU) for single node OpenShift. Single node OpenShift users can now move much of the update process to a pre-production environment, reducing the time required to update at the production site. Additionally, if an update fails or the application does not return to a working state, it can be rolled back to its pre-update state. This helps restore service as quickly as possible, regardless of whether the update is successful or not.

In addition, the OpenShift-based Appliance Builder is now available as a technology preview for Red Hat partners who want to build turnkey, customized appliances using standalone Red Hat OpenShift instances. The OpenShift-based Appliance Builder is a container-based utility that creates a disk image containing the agent-based installer that can be used to install multiple Red Hat OpenShift clusters. This makes it easier to install Red Hat OpenShift at scale at remote edge sites, as it can be done with limited or no connectivity and without the need for external registration.

Scaling workload security in the hybrid cloud

According to Red Hat's 2024 State of Kubernetes Security Report, security issues continue to impact business outcomes, with 67% of respondents saying their organizations have delayed or slowed application development due to increasing concerns. Additionally, the complexity of container-based Kubernetes environments is a factor that some organizations still struggle with.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service is now generally available to help organizations take a security-first approach to developing, deploying, and maintaining cloud-native applications at scale. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service is a fully managed Kubernetes-native security cloud service that supports both Red Hat OpenShift and non-Red Hat Kubernetes platforms, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). With Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service, organizations can start securing workloads in minutes while more easily scaling across clouds and regions without additional effort or complexity.