Red Hat Woos VMware Shops With OpenShift Virtualization Engine

Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware in November 2023 and the subsequent changes to venerable virtualization company’s business model and pricing have rankled many long-time enterprise users, a situation that has been highly publicized despite assertions by Broadcom and VMware executives that such reports are little than FUD – short for fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

A survey of 300 enterprise IT executives last year by cloud financial management company CloudBolt Software revealed a range of concerns VMware users had about the acquisition from uncertainly about Broadcom’s plans and a mandatory shift to subscription (rather than perpetual) licenses to anticipated price increases – some reports have talked of 150 percent to 200 percent jumps – and the forced bundling of products. About 95 percent of respondents saw the acquisition as disruptive to their IT strategies.

AT&T is a high-profile example. The telecommunication giant has claimed in court documents that Broadcom quoted it a 1,050 percent increase and last year sued the company for allegedly refusing to honor a renewal for support services.

Given all that, it’s not surprising that VMware customers are looking for options for their virtualized workloads. Red Hat apparently is on the list. The IBM-owned company had always had conversations with VMware users inquiring about its OpenShift container and OpenStack virtualization platform, with much of the talk focusing on modernization, according to Simon Seagrave, senior principal product marketing manager.

“Customers came to us because they wanted to bring their virtualized workloads onto a modern platform that would then allow them to modernize these specialized workloads onto containerized cloud native instances using things like serverless, DevOps, sort of GitHub methodologies, and so forth,” Seagrave tells The Next Platform.

However, the content of the conversations changed soon after Broadcom bought VMware. Almost immediately Red Hat began getting calls from VMware users that were tinged with more urgency.

“What we’ve found in the last year is that customers obviously, unfortunately, have had a little bit of sticker shock as renewal prices subscription based on their traditional virtualization platform,” he says. “They were looking for alternatives. … Customers new and existing were coming to us. ‘How can you help us? How quickly can you get us onto your platform?’ It was very much a response to the events that happened within the virtualization industry.”

For many of those enterprises, the goal was less about modernizing what they had by adding containerization capabilities and more about finding safe harbor for their virtualization workloads as their contracts with VMware expired. Red Hat this week is throwing them a lifeline with the launch of OpenShift Virtualization Engine, a new OpenShift edition that essentially removes the container capabilities to give VMware users a virtualization-only OpenShift option.

Similarly, Red Hat also unveiled Advanced Cluster Management (ACM) for Virtualization that comes with features in the vendor’s ACM for Kubernetes tool but that focuses on tasks central to VM lifecycle management, such as provisioning, monitoring, and compliance.

With OVE, “we basically took an edition of OpenShift that was just primarily focused on virtualization only,” Seagrave says. “It’s exactly the same code. It’s OpenShift virtualization. That’s no different than the other editions of OpenShift at all. It’s exactly the same, but it’s really more of a consumption model. Basically, we get rid of any of the ability to run containers on the platform, although it can technically still do it. They just won’t be license for it. It just focuses purely on virtualization. So as such, it’s not a new product per se.”

It includes the KVM hypervisor, can run both on-premises on hardware that supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and supported bare-metal cloud services in the cloud, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

ACM for Virtualization is the same tool as ACM for Kubernetes but that only manages virtual workloads. This also is paired with Red Hat’s Ansible automation platform. OVE also gives users access to Red Hat’s Migration Tool for Virtualization (MTV) to ease the moving of workloads to the new OpenShift platform. The company also has a service where its experts assess the amount of work it will take to make the migration happen.

“We find the pairing of OVE plus ACM for Virtualization and then Ansible for the migration of virtual machines at scale – but also for automating the data operations – is a support network of products that’s really resonating with customers as they migrate across and with the prospect of running their VMs going forward,” he says.

The pairing of Ansible and MTV also is key. Users can point MTV as the workloads they have in other environments – such as VMware or Microsoft’s Hyper-V – that they want to migrate and it will indicate which workloads will be easy to move and which ones will take more work. Some, such as those involved VMware’s vSAN or NSX, will need more planning than easier ones, Seagrave says. MTV lets enterprises move those that are simplest first.

That works well for smaller and midsize enterprises, but some – including many VMware users that have contacted Red Hat since the Broadcom deal – can have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of VMs.

“This is where we recommend the use of Ansible … that will allow them to migrate these at scale,” he says. “MTV still performs the migration across, but Ansible provides the way for all the automation around the migration at scale. It does allow for data operations, so after the fact, when they move their VMs over, they can continue to use Ansible with our pre-created playbooks or they can create their own playbooks that allow them to automate a lot of their data operational tasks.”

Until now, Red Hat offered various editions of OpenShift that included both virtualization and containerization capabilities. OpenShift Kubernetes Engine (OKE) was for organizations that wanted basic Kubernetes containerized capabilities, while OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) brought in more advanced GitOps kinds of features, like CI/CD pipelines – for modernizing applications and deploying them at scale – and serverless capabilities, Seagrave says.

At the top is OpenShift Platform Plus, that includes everything with OKE and OCP as well as features like Advanced Cluster Security for compliance for virtual and container workloads and ACM. The idea of a virtualization-only version of OpenShift was on the roadmap, but Red Hat accelerated its development after the sharp increase of interest from VMware users after the Broadcom deal, he says.

OVE and ACM for Virtualization are both available now.

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