DEVOPSdigest

Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat’s migration toolkit for virtualization to help organizations accelerate open hybrid cloud strategies by making it easier to migrate existing workloads to modern infrastructure in a streamlined, wholesale manner.

By bringing mission-critical applications based on virtual machines (VMs) to Red Hat OpenShift, IT organizations can experience a smoother, more scalable modernization experience while mitigating potential risks and downtime.

As more and more companies embrace containers and cloud-native technologies, IT organizations are tasked with addressing existing systems and workloads, many of which may run on infrastructure or resources that aren’t compatible with the realities of modern computing. Modernizing these deployments can be time consuming, costly and overwhelming for developers, IT operations teams and business users without the necessary tools.

In an effort to help organizations break down application barriers between traditional and cloud-native workloads, Red Hat announced OpenShift Virtualization in 2020. With OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat brought traditional application stacks forward into a layer of open innovation, enabling customers to truly transform at their own speed.

As this trend continues, Red Hat is working with customers and partners to modernize and migrate projects to help enable cloud-native capabilities through migration toolkits that come with OpenShift. These offerings now include the migration toolkit for virtualization by Red Hat, which helps migrate VMs at scale to Red Hat OpenShift. This gives organizations the ability to more easily access workloads running on virtual machines, while developing new cloud-native applications. Migrations are performed in a few simple steps, first by providing source and destination credentials, then mapping the source and destination infrastructure and creating a choreographed plan and finally, executing the migration effort.

Modernization does not happen overnight. System administrators and developers are often the point teams driving digital transformation and, relatedly, Kubernetes adoption. By bringing together modern and traditional applications, Red Hat is able to provide a consistent operational and management experience across all applications regardless of where they live or the underlying infrastructure.

With Red Hat’s migration toolkit for virtualization, organizations will benefit from a migration plan with new on-premise migration analytics capabilities that help find potential migration issues before executing. When selecting VMs to migrate, the migration toolkit for virtualization will automatically highlight any potential issues and provide information on how to solve them when possible. VMs can then be filtered down by names, folders or other parameters to review all VMs related to specific applications. Once VMs are selected, organizations may launch their automated migration - letting Red Hat do the work.

The migration toolkit for virtualization adds to Red Hat’s existing toolkits, which include:

- Migration toolkit for applications: offers an assembly of open source tools for large-scale application modernization and migration. The tooling consists of multiple individual components that support each phase of a migration process. Supported migrations include application platform upgrades, migrations to a cloud-native deployment environment and migrations from several commercial products to Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform or Red Hat build of Quarkus.

- Migration toolkit for containers: migrates stateful and stateless applications from a source cluster to a target cluster. The toolkit was originally built to help the migration from Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3 to 4, but it can also be used between OpenShift Container Platform 4 clusters, helping reallocate applications and increasing workload mobility.

Red Hat is invested in providing the open source community with the tools and practices required to help accelerate applications and infrastructure to Kubernetes. Earlier this year, Red Hat and IBM Research announced Konveyor - an open source community aimed at helping modernize and migrate workloads to open hybrid cloud by building tools, identifying patterns and providing advice on how to bring cloud-native transformation across IT. With the tools provided by Konveyor, Red Hat has been able to bring a supported version to life with migration toolkit for virtualization.