Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization roadmap chases VMware
Red Hat touted big converts to OpenShift Virtualization during Summit, but it's still working to add resiliency features VMware has had for more than a decade.
BOSTON -- What's old can be new again in tech, and this year, Red Hat is reprising decades-old hypervisor wars as it targets unhappy VMware users with its OpenShift Virtualization product.
In a bid to woo VMware converts, Red Hat went so far as to strip the container features from its OpenShift platform to offer OpenShift Virtualization Engine in January, a virtual machine-only version of its Kubernetes-based infrastructure platform, for a lower starting price. For example, Red Hat partner CDW lists a standard one-year subscription for two CPU sockets and up to 128 CPU cores on OpenShift Virtualization Engine at $1,903.99 on its website. By contrast, a one-year subscription for one to two CPU sockets on the most basic Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is listed on CDW's site at $13,765.99.
This new pricing might tempt VMware vSphere users, who were widely unsettled to the point of lawsuits against Broadcom after it ended perpetual licensing for VMware in January 2024. Even the most basic VMware vSphere standard subscription is now billed at $50 per core with a 16-core minimum purchase for one year, according to a post on Broadcom's user forum. Broadcom, which closed on its $61 billion acquisition of VMware in late 2023, also radically changed some of VMware's partnerships with public cloud vendors to emphasize private cloud. In response, Red Hat and hyperscalers such as AWS overtly began targeting VMware customers unhappy with the changes.
In some cases, Red Hat's strategy worked. The company showcased that a large-scale customer, Dubai-based financial services company Emirates NBD, is moving a 9,000-VM environment to OpenShift Virtualization at Red Hat Summit on Tuesday.
Neither Red Hat nor Nicholas Grimm, head of cloud compute at Emirates NBD, mentioned VMware by name during the presentation, but Grimm alluded to upheaval over the last year as the impetus for the move.
"Our journey to replace the current virtualization stack started more than a year ago," Grimm said during the presentation. "We were seeking a unified platform to streamline our operations for both containers and virtual machines. One of our main drivers for this transition was the rising cost associated with our existing virtualization technology."
Emirates NBD has also been a Red Hat customer for eight years. It uses OpenShift for containers, and Grimm estimated that some 70% of its applications run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
OpenShift Virtualization roadmap illuminates fine print
An OpenShift Virtualization roadmap session at Red Hat Summit this week shed light on potential roadblocks for deeply entrenched VMware vSphere customers who might want to migrate to OpenShift Virtualization.
Red Hat has taken steps to boost the scalability of live migrations through integration with the Ansible Automation Platform and the management of multiple virtual machine clusters at scale with OpenShift Virtualization support in its Red Hat's Advanced Cluster Management (ACM).
This week, the vendor made further moves to catch OpenShift Virtualization up with its own container-focused cloud offerings with support for Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in preview, general availability on IBM Cloud and initial validation efforts to support Oracle databases. These partnerships follow another deal late last year with AWS to support OpenShift Virtualization on its public cloud.
"We have you covered on all of this, and then we have partners that are providing storage, backup, DR [disaster recovery], network, so there are a lot of things you can get through our partnerships," said Doron Fediuck, senior director of engineering for virtualization and modernization at Red Hat, during the session presentation. "Now the question becomes, if you can do all that today, then why are you all here? We do have a lot to do, so we are going to talk about that."
Following Fediuck's introduction, Red Hat engineering leaders previewed features still on the roadmap that included equivalents to vSphere's Storage vMotion, the live migration of running VMs from one storage volume to another; cross-cluster and cross-namespace VM migration, a high availability feature over long geographic distances; and data backup basics such as changed block tracking,.
However, a little over six months ago, Red Hat was still working to add features to OpenShift Virtualization that have been an established part of vSphere, such as memory oversubscription and Layer 2 network virtualization.
Until last year, the product wasn't meant to compete with VMware's ESXi and vSphere hypervisors, which had been developed into a full-fledged infrastructure platform over 20 years. OpenShift Virtualization, by contrast, was released in 2020, following more than three years of support for the upstream KubeVirt project in the Red Hat OpenShift container orchestration platform under the name Container-native Virtualization. It was initially marketed as a means for OpenShift customers to modernize legacy applications that weren't easy to convert to containers by bringing them into the OpenShift fold.
'This has nothing to do with the technology'
The long-term divergence in development priorities for OpenShift and vSphere will remain reflected in the products, according to one Red Hat partner at the roadmap session, but that doesn't mean there isn't value to be gained for VMware customers.
This has nothing to do with the technology -- this is a financial decision. What we're trying to figure out is, 'How do we make a different technology as comfortable and acceptable as possible in a production environment?'
Humberto PiñaField CTO, Iron Bow Technologies
"It's understandable that there's really nothing that can replace VMware, but some government agencies that have contracts worth millions of dollars are looking at multipliers of cost increase of 2x or more," said Humberto Piña, field CTO for the chief strategy office at Iron Bow Technologies, a Red Hat reseller partner that works with government clients based in Herndon, Va, in an interview with Informa TechTarget following the session. "This has nothing to do with the technology -- this is a financial decision. What we're trying to figure out is, 'How do we make a different technology as comfortable and acceptable as possible in a production environment?'"
It still would likely benefit enterprises that won't be able to move their entire VM infrastructure away from vSphere to find parts of it that can be moved to trim costs and keep Broadcom on its toes, he said.
Red Hat has begun to catch up quickly, but Piña said he'd also like to see OpenShift Virtualization allow users to manage a mix of VM and container resources grouped by namespaces across clusters in a way that more closely resembles vSphere's GUI-based management style.
Piña asked the roadmap session speakers during a Q&A about support for such logical groupings of VMs and containers, which they said was possible to set up using open source networking projects such as Submariner, but not easily doable for now.
"One of the vCenter things that most shops do is highly leverage the folder -- if you look at a VMware vCenter UI, it looks like a Windows Explorer, and there's this hierarchy of data centers, clusters and VMs," Piña said. "In OpenShift Virtualization, you don't have that. You don't have folders. There's no file structure. And ironically, in the cloud, you do have that."
Dissecting Red Hat growth reports
While it's clear the VMware-Broadcom upheaval has resulted in a windfall for some competitors, including Red Hat, Nutanix and cloud vendors, one analyst questioned a data point Red Hat publicized for OpenShift Virtualization this week: 178% growth for the product over the last year.
"I'm almost surprised that Red Hat's not benefiting more in its financials," said Steven Dickens, CEO of HyperFrame Research, in an interview before Red Hat Summit last week.
Red Hat's software revenue growth topped out at 17% the last few quarters. But, Dickens said, that doesn't match the 18% to 19% growth reported for Red Hat in the first years after the Red Hat acquisition, which he would expect if there had been many large-scale defections to OpenShift Virtualization from among VMware's more than 500,000 customers.
"If you go back, eight quarters, 10 quarters, the Red Hat numbers were just under 20% growth. They're now down to 14% growth," he said. "So whilst they're still growing, and maybe it's the law of large numbers starting to show up, when there's such a tectonic shift going on in virtualization, why are their growth numbers not going back up?"
Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks declined to specify how many net-new customer accounts OpenShift Virtualization added in 2024, or what absolute numbers the 178% figure represents in customer growth during an interview with Informa TechTarget this week.
"Our strength generally will be customers that already have some familiarity with OpenShift because in that case, it's just less for them to learn," Hicks said. "Our market isn't limited to that, because it's a big change that customers are having to make, but the majority of our progress today … is customers that have that familiarity with OpenShift and are just adding virtualization to that in terms of scale."
Beth Pariseau, a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism covering DevOps. Have a tip? Email her or reach out @PariseauTT.
