Red Hat Inc. continues to augment its OpenShift container application platform with virtualization capabilities. Based on the premise that containers and virtual machines are complementary technologies, it announced this week that the OpenShift virtualization tool is moving to general availability.

“It will be a fully supported part of OpenShift,” said Steve Gordon (pictured), director of product management — cloud platforms at Red Hat. “And what that means is you, as a subscriber to OpenShift the platform, get virtualization as just an additional capability of that platform that you can enable as an operator from the OperatorHub.”

Gordon spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual event. They discussed how Red Hat is helping customers to combine the use of containers and virtual machines, how developers handle this new infrastructure, and the potential of this capability for Windows workloads. (* Disclosure below.)

Transition time for developers

As businesses start to adopt more container technology and even build on it, they become more interested in how to combine this tool with virtual machines, where most workloads are currently running, according to Gordon.

“For the last couple of years … a number of different projects pop up in the open-source community around this intersection of containers and visualization,” he pointed out. “And, certainly, KubeVirt is one of the projects that we’ve started in this space in reaction to both that general interest, but also the real customer problems that people have as they try and meld these two worlds.”

Leveraging the strength of Kubernetes as an orchestration platform, Red Hat began to analyze what it would be like to orchestrate virtual machines on that same platform alongside its application containers.

“And the extension of the KubeVirt project and what has ultimately become OpenShift virtualization is based around that core idea of ‘How can I make a traditional virtual machine — so a full operating system — interact with and look exactly like a Kubernetes native construct that I can use from the same platform?’” Gordon asked.

For developers, this is a time of transition, when they start building their workloads almost entirely around these container constructions — in some cases starting from scratch but still want to bring in the traditional workloads they have, according to Gordon.

“I think we’ve seen this gradual transition where there is a growing interest in reevaluating ‘How do we start with container-based architectures?’ to ‘Okay, how have we transitioned towards more production scenarios and the growth in production scenarios?’” he explained.

In this new environment there is an enormous potential for Windows workloads, for example.

“Where OpenShift virtualization helps with that is we can actually take an existing virtual machine workload, bring that across, even if it says Windows server 2012, run it on top of the OpenShift virtualization platform as a VM, and then, if or when you start modernizing more of that application, you can start teasing that out into actual containers,” Gordon concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual Experience. Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE