Learn about OpenShift Virtualization’s capabilities and support scope.
OpenShift Virtualization is an add-on to OpenShift Container Platform that allows you to run and manage virtual machine workloads alongside container workloads.
OpenShift Virtualization adds new objects into your OpenShift Container Platform cluster by using Kubernetes custom resources to enable virtualization tasks. These tasks include:
Creating and managing Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs)
Running pod and VM workloads alongside each other in a cluster
Connecting to virtual machines through a variety of consoles and CLI tools
Importing and cloning existing virtual machines
Managing network interface controllers and storage disks attached to virtual machines
Live migrating virtual machines between nodes
An enhanced web console provides a graphical portal to manage these virtualized resources alongside the OpenShift Container Platform cluster containers and infrastructure.
OpenShift Virtualization is designed and tested to work well with Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation features.
When you deploy OpenShift Virtualization with OpenShift Data Foundation, you must create a dedicated storage class for Windows virtual machine disks. See Optimizing ODF PersistentVolumes for Windows VMs for details. |
You can use OpenShift Virtualization with OVN-Kubernetes, OpenShift SDN, or one of the other certified network plugins listed in Certified OpenShift CNI Plug-ins.
You can check your OpenShift Virtualization cluster for compliance issues by installing the Compliance Operator and running a scan with the ocp4-moderate
and ocp4-moderate-node
profiles. The Compliance Operator uses OpenSCAP, a NIST-certified tool, to scan and enforce security policies.
If you use the storage API with known storage providers, the volume and access modes are selected automatically. However, if you use a storage class that does not have a storage profile, you must configure the volume and access mode.
For best results, use the ReadWriteMany
(RWX) access mode and the Block
volume mode. This is important for the following reasons:
ReadWriteMany
(RWX) access mode is required for live migration.
The Block
volume mode performs significantly better than the Filesystem
volume mode. This is because the Filesystem
volume mode uses more storage layers, including a file system layer and a disk image file. These layers are not necessary for VM disk storage.
For example, if you use Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation, Ceph RBD volumes are preferable to CephFS volumes.
You cannot live migrate virtual machines with the following configurations:
Set the |
You can install OpenShift Virtualization on single-node OpenShift.
However, you should be aware that Single-node OpenShift does not support the following features:
High availability
Pod disruption
Live migration
Virtual machines or templates that have an eviction strategy configured