Red Hat Inc. is stepping up its support for Kubernetes, the orchestration manager for software containers, with a trio of new and enhanced products that it’s rolling out today at its virtual Red Hat Summit.

OpenShift virtualization, which is available as a technology preview within Red Hat OpenShift, enables organizations to develop, deploy and manage applications running in virtual machines alongside those in containers as well as on serverless platforms, which are composed to microservices assembled on the fly. Derived from the KubeVirt open-source project, it addresses the limitations of VM-based workloads that can’t easily be encapsulated in containers.

Although much has been made of the adaptability of software containers, “some applications run better in a VM, such as some databases, while big data application run better containers” said Brian Gracely, senior director of product strategy at Red Hat. “There is a need to harmonize them and manage them centrally.”

The offering is aimed at organizations that are running multiple Kubernetes clusters internally or across multiple clouds. By placing virtualized workloads directly into development workflows, teams can migrate them to containers without abandoning virtualized components entirely.

VM-centric management is important because “VMs are still a critical part of the infrastructure stack in most organizations,” said Paul Delory, research director for data center and cloud operations at Gartner Inc. Once wrapped in a container using KubeVirt, “that container, with the VM inside, can then participate in container-based workflows and management techniques, including scheduling it in Kubernetes,” he said.

Such a capability is useful in refactoring VMs for containers, incorporate legacy applications that can’t be containerized into workflows, preserving VM security inside containerized applications, testing using ephemeral infrastructure and even saving on software license costs. The KubeVirt community focuses on refactoring under the assumption that VMs will eventually go away, but “VMs may have more staying power than they think,” Delory said.

Red Hat is also announcing version 4.4 of OpenShift, its version of Kubernetes. This release uses Kubernetes Operators, which are software extensions that make use of custom resources to manage applications and their components. The new version adds such features as a developer-centric view of platform metrics and monitoring for application workloads. It monitors integration for Red Hat Operators and provides cost management for assessing the resources and costs used for specific applications across the hybrid cloud.

“In a lot of cases developers who wants to monitor an application has to bring their own toolset,” Gracely said. “The developer-centric view is about developers being able to see the metrics that matter to them.”

Finally, Red Hat is introducing Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes in a technology preview. It provides a single control point for the monitoring and deployment of OpenShift clusters at scale with policy-driven governance and application lifecycle management. Users can stand up new clusters and let the subscription framework handle the continuous delivery of applications across all of their environments, the company said.

The cluster management capability “was a project that was buried inside IBM’s portfolio,” when IBM acquired Red Hat last year, Gracely said. “We literally brought a team over from IBM and took portions of that product to build ACM.”

In addition to enabling users to spin Kubernetes clusters up and down, the software can be used to monitor and bill back costs and set standard governance policies in areas such as security and compliance across multiple Kubernetes clusters. Users get a single view of hybrid cloud deployments running across physical, virtual, private cloud and public cloud environments. Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes is expected to be available in mid-summer.

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