For many organizations, legacy virtualization solutions can stifle innovation and IT advancement, which can limit the path to hybrid cloud infrastructure, where workloads and resources span physical, virtual and cloud-based environments. The cost of maintaining these existing infrastructure investments can tie up a significant portion of IT budgets. Compounding this, Gartner states, "IT organizations with goals for "doing more with less" find it difficult to quantify, estimate and communicate the level of non-discretionary IT spending needed to sustain business transformation." With the budget remaining, an organization can be forced to put digital transformation, the modernization of IT environments through digital technologies, on hold.

To help combat this, today, Red Hat is introducing an offering to help provide an open pathway to digital transformation. Designed to help enterprises cut costs and speed innovation through cloud-native and container-based technologies, Red Hat infrastructure migration solution enables enterprises to break down closed technology silos centered on proprietary virtualization. The solution also provides an enterprise-ready pathway to cloud-native application development via Linux containers, Kubernetes, automation, and other open source technologies.

The Red Hat infrastructure migration solution is designed to help organizations accelerate transformation by more safely migrating and managing workloads to an open source infrastructure platform. A standard migration consists of three phases:

Discovery Session: In this first phase, Red Hat Consulting will engage with an organization in a complementary Discovery Session to better understand and document the scope of the migration.

Migration pilot: During this phase, an open source platform is deployed and operationalized using Red Hat’s hybrid cloud infrastructure and management tooling. Pilot migrations take place to demonstrate typical approaches, establish initial migration capability, and define the requirements for a larger scale migration.

Migration at scale: In the third phase, IT teams are able to begin migrating workloads at scale. Red Hat Consulting also offers design and implementation assistance to help build and optimize full-production infrastructures, unify and better streamline operations across virtualization pools, and navigate complex migration cases.

Products to help facilitate infrastructure migration

After the Discovery Session, recommendations are provided for a more flexible open source virtualization platform based on Red Hat technologies, including:

Red Hat Virtualization: Offering an open software-defined infrastructure and centralized management platform for virtualized Linux and Windows workloads, Red Hat Virtualization is designed to empower customers with greater efficiency for traditional workloads, while also creating a launchpad for cloud-native and container-based application innovation.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform: Built on the enterprise-grade backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenStack Platform helps users to build an on-premises cloud architecture that provides resource elasticity, scalability and increased efficiency.

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure: A portfolio of solutions, including Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization and Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud, for customers looking to consolidate compute, network and storage in a form-factor designed to provide greater operational and cost efficiency.

Using newly released migration capabilities based on Red Hat’s management technologies, including Red Hat Ansible Automation, new workloads can be delivered in an automated fashion with self-service. In addition, these new capabilities enable IT to more quickly recreate these workloads across hybrid and multicloud environments. Existing workloads are analyzed and migrated, in a controlled manner using enterprise-grade tooling, to better satisfy workload-specific business requirements.

Technology innovations

During an infrastructure migration, some applications may run more efficiently in containers, which can help to eliminate the need for full virtual machines in some case. To help address these scenarios, the Red Hat infrastructure migration solution provides an on-ramp for organizations to adopt Linux containers and Kubernetes orchestration via Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as their common hybrid cloud platform. Offered standalone or as a component of Red Hat Cloud Suite, OpenShift helps to simplify the migration of existing applications to Linux containers, enabling organizations to benefit from cloud-native workloads without sacrificing existing IT investments.

Additionally, Red Hat is working on new innovations to help further bridge the gap between virtual machines and containers. The siloed nature of each technology can sometimes stifle digital transformation efforts with undue complexity and limited integration. To help address this, Red Hat has introduced container-native virtualization. Based on the open source KubeVirt community project, container-native virtualization enables developers to work with VMs in the same way that they would work with Linux container-based applications.

Learn more

To learn more about the benefits of infrastructure migration through virtualization and open source technologies, please visit the virtualization optimization page for additional information.

Supporting quotes

Joe Fernandes, vice president, Cloud Platforms Products at Red Hat

"Legacy virtualization infrastructure can serve as a stumbling block to, rather than a catalyst, for IT innovation. From licensing costs to closed vendor ecosystems, these silos can hold organizations back from evolving their operations to better meet customer demand. We’re providing a way for enterprises to leapfrog these legacy deployments and move to an open, flexible, enterprise platform, one that is designed for digital transformation and primed for the ecosystem of cloud-native development, Kubernetes, and automation."

Dmitrij Volchek, head of department of system engineering support and communication, Development Bank of the Republic of Belarus

"At the Development Bank of the Republic of Belarus, we had to build our infrastructure from scratch. When it came time to make decisions about our IT infrastructure, cost and innovative technology were both top of mind. We migrated from proprietary virtualization to Red Hat Virtualization for improved performance and costs benefits, and our experience has been a positive one. The migration with Red Hat moved quickly and was simple, and the flexibility has helped us to reduce our total cost of ownership."