Migrating to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with NetApp FlexPod

The path to virtualization started decades ago. Early efforts with mainframes in the 1960s allowed multiple operating systems to run on the same hardware.  In the late 1990s, the virtualization of x86 hardware was introduced, and reshaped the way organizations deployed, managed, and scaled IT infrastructure.  Applications were no longer bound to a single server.  They could be moved at will, and even scaled to meet demand.  Entire businesses and careers have been built on what we now know as traditional virtualization.  And even as public cloud computing has become more accessible, traditional virtualization continues to evolve and will be with us for some time.  Gartner projects that “70% of x86 datacenter workloads will continue to use hypervisor-based virtualization through 2027”

Current challenges

Even highly effective traditions must evolve to meet changing needs.  Today, organizations face pressures that are forcing them to reassess long-standing virtualization strategies, including:

• Changes in market pricing: Recent changes to licensing and increased prices has many organizations exploring more cost-effective alternatives.
• The rise of cloud-native development: Modern application development is moving towards a microservices architecture, where applications are split into small, independent components. Containers are the widely accepted standard for this approach.  Many businesses are looking for ways to adopt these modern development practices without abandoning existing infrastructure.
• The need to maintain a hybrid cloud environment:  Not every application can, or should be, moved to the cloud. Many enterprises need to manage both simultaneously.  This hybrid approach creates a new set of challenges, like managing disparate infrastructure and ensuring consistent security policies without  creating silos of knowledge and tools.

A unified platform

How can organizations overcome these challenges, while maintaining their existing investments and preparing for the future?

The answer is to have a consistent and unified platform that can run both containers and virtual machines (VM) across hybrid clouds. This way, the container team and the VM team can leverage the same tools to deploy apps.  For organizations that aren't quite ready to modernize their application stack, they can still leverage cloud-native tooling without being locked into a closed ecosystem.

In a unified platform, the VMs run as containers utilizing the same compute, network, and storage architecture as containers. Admins and developers can adapt their skillsets quickly and easily.

Why persistent storage is essential

Persistent storage is a fundamental requirement for both containerized applications and VMs, particularly for applications that need to maintain their state, store user data, or preserve information across restarts or updates. Storage architecture in Kubernetes offers both persistent storage and ephemeral (non-persistent) options, enabling containers and VMs to access and utilize the storage resources. Dynamic provisioning of storage simplifies storage management, optimizes resource utilization. The Container Storage Interface (CSI) standard was developed for exposing arbitrary block and file storage systems to containerized workloads on Kubernetes and Kubernetes based platforms.

Your organization needs a robust and efficient storage solution for Kubernetes workloads. Specifically, you need an enterprise-grade solution with a proven track record for advanced data management, and a strong partner ecosystem.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and NetApp: The unified foundation

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is a feature of OpenShift that allows VMs to run alongside containers.  This technology is built on the upstream KubeVirt project and utilizes the kernel virtual machine (KVM) hypervisor, a robust technology with over 15 years of development.  Now, OpenShift administrators are able to run their containerized applications and VMS in one unified platform. This lowers operational costs and increases efficiency.  

Running VMs in OpenShift Virtualization doesn't mean reinstalling or refactoring your applications.   Red Hat provides the useful migration toolkit for virtualization (MTV) as a free operator in the OpenShift Operator Hub.  Once installed, a VM can be migrated from a legacy environment,  including vSphere. MTV creates a migration plan, which maps storage and network resources.  Once you deploy it, the plan copies the data over to the new environment and creates the required Kubernetes resources for the VM to run.  MTV supports both cold and warm migrations (Red Hat typically recommends warm migrations for only the most critical workloads).

Best of all, this can all be done through a Web UI, or at scale with Ansible Automation Platform.

How do you ensure your newly modernized workloads have the same data resilience and reliability as as before? This is where NetApp comes in.  By collaborating with Red Hat, NetApp is able to bring its proven storage and data protection capabilities to OpenShift. 

FlexPod, a design from NetApp validated by Cisco

One of the strongest examples of this collaboration is FlexPod. Even with the shift toward public cloud services, there is still a strong demand for datacenters and private clouds.  Yet, how do organizations ensure that they can develop once and deploy anywhere? That's where the FlexPod Datacenter with OpenShift Virtualization solution comes into play. FlexPod is the result of 15 years of strategic partnership between Cisco and NetApp. Rather than piecing together disparate components from several vendors, FlexPod provides a validated solution that combines compute, storage, and networking. Red Hat OpenShift then provides the application layer. This converged infrastructure platform is meticulously engineered to deliver unmatched efficiency, scalability, and performance, making it ideal for a wide range of datacenter workloads. It leverages the best of Cisco and NetApp technologies with Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) Servers, Cisco Nexus Networking and. Data Management solutions from NetApp.  

This powerful combination offers a consistent platform to run both containers and virtualized workloads, including CPU and GPU-accelerated AI/ML workloads, software, models, and OpenShift Virtualization, all on the same infrastructure.

By standardizing on a validated design like FlexPod, organizations can accelerate deployment without any guesswork, reducing operational complexities, and simplifying management and maintenance.

NetApp: Comprehensive storage solutions for the enterprise

Behind every NeApp storage system is ONTAP, the proprietary operating system for NetApp’s storage systems.  It is the core software that manages, protects, and optimizes data across various environments.  NetApp offers robust enterprise storage, from on-premesis to the public cloud.  This includes self-managed storage and managed cloud storage services, like Azure NetApp Files, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, or FSx for NetApp ONTAP in AWS. NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure is designed to meet the persistent storage needs of modern stateful workloads, anywhere, including OpenShift.

Dynamic storage provisioning with NetApp Trident

NetApp’s Trident is a dynamic storage provisioner for Kubernetes that orchestrates storage provisioning from ONTAP, both on-premises and in the cloud, for container workloads as well as virtual machines. It's compliant with the industry-standard Container Storage Interface (CSI) NetApp Trident Protect is an add-on to Trident that offers advanced application data management capabilities. It enhances the functionality and availability of stateful Kubernetes applications, like in OpenShift, and is backed by NetApp ONTAP storage systems. 

Both Trident and Trident Protect are available at  no additional cost to NetApp customers, enabling them to take full advantage of ONTAP’s feature-rich storage for containerized and virtual machine workloads

Versatile protocol support and storage drivers

Trident supports a wide array of protocols for end-to-end storage provisioning and access, including NAS (NFS/SMB) and SAN (iSCSI, FC, and NVMe/TCP), using a variety of storage drivers for both on-premises and cloud environments.

Seamless integration with Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA)

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) is a managed OpenShift Container Platform service available on AWS. NetApp offers a managed storage solution in AWS called FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN), a highly performant storage solution that integrates seamlessly with ROSA. Trident supports the same drivers used for on-premises environments for FSxN, ensuring consistent and reliable storage management.

Facilitating VM migration

Migrating VMs from older, legacy platforms to modern alternatives like OpenShift Virtualization is a critical strategic initiative for many businesses today. Trident facilitates this migration by providing dynamic storage provisioning solutions on modern platforms. Regardless of the protocol used, Trident supports the required RWX access modes for all protocols, enabling live migration of VMs on OpenShift platforms. It can expose the underlying ONTAP storage using all Kubernetes access modes, offering you a multitude of choices for using backend storage.

Data protection and disaster recovery for business continuity

NetApp Trident Protect, formerly known as Astra Control, is an advanced add-on to Trident designed to deliver comprehensive data protection and disaster recovery for Kubernetes workloads, including both VMs and containers. This powerful solution is available to NetApp customers at no additional cost, enhancing the capabilities of NetApp Trident.

Trident Protect leverages Kubernetes constructs, such as Custom Resource Definitions (CRD) and Custom Resources (CR), to orchestrate low recovery point objective (RPO) and low recovery time objective (RTO) disaster recovery using NetApp's SnapMirror Technology. This ensures your data remains secure and recoverable in the event of a disaster.

Flexible snapshots and backups 

With Trident Protect, you can create snapshots and backups of entire VMs, including VM disks and metadata. These snapshots and backups can be securely stored in an object store and restored when needed. This provides robust options for data recovery, ensuring business continuity and resilience.

Key takeaways

The story of IT has always been one of evolution. Mainframes gave way to virtualization, and now cloud native application development and hybrid cloud architectures are driving the next major shift in computing.  

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure, along with validated designs with FlexPod, can help organizations transition to this future with confidence.  Together, they provide a single, validated platform for running both containers and VMs.  This reduces complexity, safeguards critical workloads, and bridges the gap between traditional virtualization and modern app development.