In November 2024, IBM® announced the availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.17 on IBM® Power®, and today we are building on that to further support our clients on their modernization journeys. Red Hat® OpenShift® 4.18 has been released and adds improvements and new capabilities to OpenShift Container Platform components. Based on Kubernetes 1.31 and CRI-O 1.31, Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 focused on core and virtualization enhancements, and adds further improvements in secrets and certificate management. This release adds four new data centers to IBM® Power® Virtual Server Installer Provisioned Infrastructure deployments and adds compute nodes to on-prem clusters using OpenShift CLI for Power. There are numerous overall enhancements with this new release. Here are a few of the highlights of Red Hat OpenShift 4.18:
Enhance Network Flexibility with User Defined Networks and Border Gateway Protocol for Pods and Virtual Machines
Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 promotes User Defined Networks (UDNs) to general availability from its previous technology preview status in OpenShift 4.17. UDNs are the first in a forthcoming series of OpenShift networking enhancements designed to bring data center networking concepts into Kubernetes and support seamless integration between OpenShift’s OVN-Kubernetes cluster network and existing external networks, along with targeted networking solutions that cross over that boundary. Specifically, UDN improves the flexibility and segmentation capability of the default layer 3 Kubernetes pod network by enabling customer layer 2, layer 3, and localnet network segments that act as either primary or secondary networks for container pods and virtual machines using the default OpenShift OVN-Kubernetes networking. UDN augments OpenShift’s Multus-enabled secondary Container Network Interface (CNI) capability by providing a comparable experience and feature set to all network segments.
Operator Lifecycle Management Delivers Enhanced Security and GitOps Integration
Operator Lifecycle Management (OLM) has transformed Red Hat OpenShift 4, helping users install, update, and manage the lifecycle of all operators and associated services running across their environment. OLM also enables complementary solutions such as Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh, and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, while unlocking advanced workloads like Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and SR-IOV networking. Building on these achievements, OLM is advancing toward more streamlined APIs and enhanced declarative integration with Red Hat OpenShift GitOps.
Those are just a new of the highlights of this new release of Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 on IBM Power. Take a look at the many more enhancements in OpenShift 4.18 here. Download the data sheet here on how to get started with Red Hat OpenShift on Power. When you’re ready to get started on your modernization journey with Red Hat and IBM Power, go here.