IBM & Red Hat on AWS
Unlocking Transformative Benefits of Modernizing VMware workloads to Red Hat OpenShift on AWS
In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, enterprises are seeking ways to modernize and migrate their VMware workloads and virtual machines (VMs) to the cloud. One such approach that has gained traction is the migration of traditional virtual machines (VMs) to containerized environments like Red Hat OpenShift on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or directly migrate to OpenShift Virtualization on AWS.
Many customers are looking for ways to migrate and modernize their VMware workloads. While speed is one of the most important factors for these customers, the speed of migrating the actual VM to the cloud is just one factor to consider. There are additional requirements that must be implemented before a VM can be considered production ready, from observability to how you expose the VM to traffic.
This blog post will explore the what, why, and how of modernizing VMware VMs and workloads to Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), providing you with an understanding of the migration process along with additional resources to dive deeper.
What is Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS
Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) is a cloud-native application platform that enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage containerized applications seamlessly on AWS. It provides an opinionated stack of services built on top of Kubernetes, offering a set of features for automating application deployment, scaling, and management.
ROSA is a fully managed service supported by Red Hat Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) that combines the power of OpenShift with the scalability and flexibility of the AWS Cloud. This integration allows organizations to leverage the benefits of a cloud-native platform while taking advantage of the extensive range of services offered by AWS, such as serverless computing, managed databases, and advanced analytics.
Why migrate VMware VMs to OpenShift Virtualization on ROSA?
With OpenShift Virtualization on ROSA we can satisfy the speed of the actual VM migration to the cloud and decrease the time it takes to move the VM into production by simplifying the operational requirements. With the Red Hat Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV), you can connect your existing VMware cluster to ROSA, select the VMs you wish to migrate and then import them into ROSA. Once there, customers can leverage ROSA’s built in tools for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), out of the box metrics, dashboards, load balancing, and alerting without requiring changes to the VM itself.
With this approach customers can accelerate their cloud migration and reduce the overall time to replatform from VMware vSphere or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) to AWS.
Moving VMware workloads to Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) offers a range of advantages, especially for organizations aiming to modernize applications, tap into cloud-native features, and simplify operations. Below are key reasons to consider migrating VMware workloads to ROSA.
Advantages of OpenShift Virtualization on ROSA
Cloud-Native approach where organizations can leverage the benefits of a cloud-native architecture, such as improved resource utilization, faster deployment cycles, and streamlined application management.
Increased Agility and Scalability, traditional virtual machines can be resource-intensive and less agile when it comes to scaling or updating applications. OpenShift on AWS provides automated scaling capabilities, allowing applications to dynamically adjust to changing workloads, ensuring optimal performance and efficient resource utilization.
Reduced licensing costs with built-in unlimited RHEL entitlements. OpenShift Virtualization includes unlimited RHEL subscriptions for all RHEL guest VMs.
Enhanced Security and Compliance, ROSA adheres to industry-leading security standards and complies with various regulatory requirements. It offers features like built-in security controls, automated vulnerability management, and secure multi-tenancy, ensuring that applications and data remain protected.
Reduced Operational Overhead, by leveraging ROSA, organizations can offload many operational tasks, such as infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and maintenance, to the managed service. This reduction in operational overhead allows teams to focus on delivering business value rather than managing complex infrastructure.
Pay-As-You-Go, allowing you to pay only for the resources you consume. Migrating to ROSA reduces the need for large upfront investments typical of traditional data center models.
High Availability of VM workloads with built-in features of OpenShift and AWS Availability Zones. Utilize AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to simplify connectivity to the VMs across the Availability Zones.
Disaster Recovery capabilities available in ROSA utilizing AWS global infrastructure and services to replicate your environments and applications across geographically dispersed AWS regions.
Unlocking Transformative Benefits of Modernizing with ROSA
Traditionally customers that want to migrate a VM based application to the cloud and convert it to containers had a limited set of options of how to proceed. They could perform a lift and shift migration to a similar compute platform, as an example convert the VMware workload to run on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). At this stage the customer is in the cloud and gains the benefits of AWS Cloud, but the application itself did not gain any benefits.
To get to containers the customer must now embark on a modernization journey, decomposing their VM based applications into microservices, deploying them as containers, and finally moving the newly containerized applications to the container platform of their choice.
What if customers had another simpler option, an option where the VM could be migrated directly to the cloud and into the container platform directly?
This is where OpenShift Virtualization and ROSA can help. OpenShift Virtualization is based on the upstream project KubeVirt, which allows customers to run VMs as native resources within Kubernetes. All of the functionality and features available to containers are now extended to VMs. If our containerized applications are using a Service Mesh we can add our VMs to it. The same way we expose containers by defining a service object is how we would expose and load balance traffic to VMs. Not to mention additional features like vertically scaling VM resources (CPU/MEM) on demand, and the ability to live-migrate VMs.
ROSA provides the ability to manage both VMs and containers on the same platform, allowing us to decompose the VM based applications into microservices, reducing the number of steps in our migration. For VMs that can’t be converted or that need to remain as a VM for reasons like licensing, we still gain all the application centric benefits from ROSA. While reducing the operational overhead with a single pane of glass and a common set of tools for both containers and VMs.
Steps to modernizing VMs on ROSA
Throughout the migration process, it is crucial to involve cross-functional teams, including application developers, operations personnel, and security experts. This collaborative approach ensures that the migration is executed efficiently, and that the resulting environment aligns with the organization’s goals and requirements.
Additionally, it is recommended to leverage the expertise of Red Hat and AWS partners who specialize in cloud migration and modernization projects. These partners can provide valuable guidance, best practices, and hands-on assistance to streamline the migration process and ensure a successful outcome.
Here are the high-level steps of migrating and modernizing VMware VMs to ROSA.
Planning and Assessment by identifying and prioritizing the applications or workloads to be migrated. Assess the application architecture, dependencies, and resource requirements. Evaluate the potential challenges and risks associated with the migration.
Application containerization by refactoring or re-architecting the applications to follow containerized principles and best practices. Package the applications and their dependencies into container images. Ensure that the containerized applications are thoroughly tested and validated.
Infrastructure setup by provisioning the necessary infrastructure on AWS, such as Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), subnets, and security groups. Deploy and configure the ROSA cluster by subscribing and deploying it through the Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS Marketplace listing. Set up any additional AWS services required by the applications, such as databases, caching, or messaging systems.
Application Deployment by pushing the container images to a container registry accessible by the OpenShift cluster. Define and apply the necessary Kubernetes resources (e.g., Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps) to deploy the applications on OpenShift. Configure networking, storage, and other resources as needed. For seamless migration of a VMware VM to ROSA Virtualization follow the information on the ROSA Virtualization blog.
Testing and validation, Thoroughly test the deployed applications to ensure they function as expected in the new environment. Validate performance, scalability, and resilience under various load conditions. Perform security and compliance checks to ensure adherence to organizational policies and regulatory requirements.
Monitoring and maintenance by implementing monitoring and logging solutions to gain visibility into the application and infrastructure performance. Establish processes for ongoing maintenance, updates, and scaling of the applications on OpenShift. Leverage OpenShift’s built-in capabilities for rolling updates, rollbacks, and auto-scaling to streamline application lifecycle management.
Summary
Enterprises can accelerate their digital transformation journey, foster innovation, and stay ahead in an increasingly competitive market by leveraging the power of containerization and the cloud-native capabilities of OpenShift on AWS. Careful planning, adherence to best practices, and collaboration with experienced partners can minimize challenges and complexities in the migration.
Should you wish to dive deeper into this please do not hesitate to reach out to your AWS or Red Hat account team or email the AWS Red Hat partner team, or check the dates for an OpenShift Virtualization roadshow near you.
Further Content
Subscribe to Red Hat OpenShift on AWS listing