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About OpenShift Virtualization

What you can do with OpenShift Virtualization

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

  • 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 the OVN-Kubernetes, OpenShift SDN, or one of the other certified network plugins listed in Certified OpenShift CNI Plug-ins.

OpenShift Virtualization supported cluster version

OpenShift Virtualization 4.12 is supported for use on OpenShift Container Platform 4.12 clusters. To use the latest z-stream release of OpenShift Virtualization, you must first upgrade to the latest version of OpenShift Container Platform.

Single-node OpenShift differences

You can install OpenShift Virtualization on a single-node cluster.

When provisioning a single-node OpenShift cluster with the assisted installer, preconfigured persistent storage is deployed automatically.

  • In OpenShift Virtualization 4.10 and 4.11, the HostPath Provisioner (HPP) is automatically installed.

  • In OpenShift Virtualization 4.12, the OpenShift Data Foundation Logical Volume Manager Operator is the provided out-of-the-box storage solution. You can also manually deploy using the HPP.

Single-node OpenShift does not support high availability. Be aware of the following differences in functionality from a multiple-node cluster:

  • Pod disruption budgets are not supported.

  • Live migration is not supported.

  • Due to differences in storage behavior, some virtual machine templates are incompatible with single-node OpenShift. To ensure compatibility, templates or virtual machines that use data volumes or storage profiles must not have the eviction strategy set.

Additional resources