OpenShift Virtualization is a feature of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) and OpenShift Kubernetes Engine that allows you to run and manage virtual machine workloads alongside container workloads. Based on the open source project KubeVirt, the goal of OpenShift Virtualization is to help enterprises move from a VM-based infrastructure to a Kubernetes-and-container-based stack, one application at a time.

In my previous article, I showed you how to set up and enable OpenShift Virtualization running on Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2). In that article, I noted that OpenShift Virtualization looks for hardware virtualization by default, which requires a bare-metal server instance. If you are running OpenShift on AWS EC2, as I do, then you have to enable software emulation over the default hardware virtualization. Otherwise, you need a bare-metal instance from the public cloud provider or a pure bare-metal solution.

In this article, I show you how to switch OpenShift Virtualization from its default of hardware virtualization to QEMU-based software emulation. You will then be able to start and operate a virtual machine through OpenShift Virtualization, even in a non-bare metal instance such as AWS EC2.

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