Most organisations now are starting to use a mix of Virtual machines and Containers running mission critical applications in their Data Centers. Existing systems, treat VMs and Containers separately, but container applications and Kubernetes orchestration as provided by RedHat Openshift are becoming the standard for new Applications. Virtualised workloads are not going anywhere fast !....for many business & technical reasons.

So the question that comes up is....How do we bring these two worlds closer together

What is Container Native Virtualisation (CNV) ?

It's Technology that enables developers to use the Openshift Container Platform as a unified platform for building, modifying and deploying applications residing in both container and virtual machines in a common shared environment. This also means that VMs can be added to your Openshift projects directly from the service catalog.

Openshift with KubeVirt

 

From a high level, you have your traditional Hypervisor running your VMs that is hosting your applications. With KubeVirt, you can import those, running alongside everything in your Openshift cluster and have a simplified stack...

Some of the client scenarios where KubeVirt can be used ?

Suppose you have a vendor supplied legacy application running on a VM that you can't touch, you just want to pull it onto your Openshift infrastructure and run it as-is alongside everything else.

The other use case is a VM that you would like to eventually containerise, instead of using a traditional modernisation approach, you can just port the VM onto your Openshift Infrastructure and then modernise it into micro services down the line at your own pace. This may be a situation where you don't want to rush things, your developers may not be ready, your administrators may not be trained yet for this new world or your internal processes may not be adapted yet to work in that new way...

Once the VM is imported, you can then start to break it into micro services where VMs and Containers start to talk to each other and eventually you get to a point where you get rid of all the functionalities of the VM, you can then retire it and run everything in containers with micro services.

Some other advantages of having VMs running side by side with Containers is that they both use the same underlying storage stack. same backup, operational support and the maintenance processes are now identical. This will definitely lower your TCO by simplifying your training, administration, and take advantage of the same monitoring, everything is using the same routing & networking as well under a common pane of glass. There is no longer the need for some admins to work in the VM world and another team in the Container world, they all work under the same administration framework with Openshift.

So basically, what KubeVirt provides is an easy to use, simple pane of glass...Remember, this is not Production ready yet.....So do not use in Production environments yet :-)

The workflow convergence means that:

• Converging VM management into container management workflows
• Using the same tooling (kubectl) for containers and Virtual Machines
• Keeping the declarative API for VM management (just like pods, deployments, etc…)

High Level Architecture

The truth here is that a KubeVirt VM is a KVM+qemu process running inside a pod. It's as simple as that.

Much more details are available here and here...

Hi,

I read about the Openshift Virtualisation, and to be honest feel impressed and at the same time sceptical. Do you have any statistics or worldwide use case that have been done, noting that it supposed to support also Windows workload. 

I think we are still in the early adopter cycle for this technology.

Thank you for the article

Original Message:
Sent: Wed December 16, 2020 07:09 PM
From: susheel gooly
Subject: Container Native Virtualization Use cases

Most organisations now are starting to use a mix of Virtual machines and Containers running mission critical applications in their Data Centers. Existing systems, treat VMs and Containers separately, but container applications and Kubernetes orchestration as provided by RedHat Openshift are becoming the standard for new Applications. Virtualised workloads are not going anywhere fast !....for many business & technical reasons.

So the question that comes up is....How do we bring these two worlds closer together

Openshift provides "Container Native "virtualisation.

What is Container Native Virtualisation (CNV) ?

It's Technology that enables developers to use the Openshift Container Platform as a unified platform for building, modifying and deploying applications residing in both container and virtual machines in a common shared environment. This also means that VMs can be added to your Openshift projects directly from the service catalog.

Openshift with KubeVirt

 

From a high level, you have your traditional Hypervisor running your VMs that is hosting your applications. With KubeVirt, you can import those, running alongside everything in your Openshift cluster and have a simplified stack...

Some of the client scenarios where KubeVirt can be used ?

Suppose you have a vendor supplied legacy application running on a VM that you can't touch, you just want to pull it onto your Openshift infrastructure and run it as-is alongside everything else.

The other use case is a VM that you would like to eventually containerise, instead of using a traditional modernisation approach, you can just port the VM onto your Openshift Infrastructure and then modernise it into micro services down the line at your own pace. This may be a situation where you don't want to rush things, your developers may not be ready, your administrators may not be trained yet for this new world or your internal processes may not be adapted yet to work in that new way...

Once the VM is imported, you can then start to break it into micro services where VMs and Containers start to talk to each other and eventually you get to a point where you get rid of all the functionalities of the VM, you can then retire it and run everything in containers with micro services.

Some other advantages of having VMs running side by side with Containers is that they both use the same underlying storage stack. same backup, operational support and the maintenance processes are now identical. This will definitely lower your TCO by simplifying your training, administration, and take advantage of the same monitoring, everything is using the same routing & networking as well under a common pane of glass. There is no longer the need for some admins to work in the VM world and another team in the Container world, they all work under the same administration framework with Openshift.

So basically, what KubeVirt provides is an easy to use, simple pane of glass...Remember, this is not Production ready yet.....So do not use in Production environments yet :-)

The workflow convergence means that:

• Converging VM management into container management workflows
• Using the same tooling (kubectl) for containers and Virtual Machines
• Keeping the declarative API for VM management (just like pods, deployments, etc…)

High Level Architecture

The truth here is that a KubeVirt VM is a KVM+qemu process running inside a pod. It's as simple as that.

Much more details are available here and here...

------------------------------
susheel gooly
Senior Enterprise Architect
Cloud Migration & Modernisation
+65 82991561
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