Red Hat updated its OpenShift platform with new features designed to make it easier to migrate and manage virtual machines (VMs) across a cloud environment, updates that match many being put out by rivals that continue to highlight opportunities in attracting long-time VMware customers looking for alternatives in the market.

The latest OpenShift 4.22 release includes a number of updates, but specific updates to its OpenShift Virtualization product is targeted at easing VM management. This includes the ability for users to “modernize” their infrastructure – which is often code word for migrating VMs to container-based platforms – without impacting ongoing operations.

The updates include Ethernet virtual private network (EVPN) integration with user-defined networks that allows an organization to connect containerized and virtualized workloads to external infrastructure. This supports static IPs maintaining their persistence during VM migrations, which reduces the risk for downtime or requiring network reconfiguration.

The OpenShift 4.22 update also includes “streamlined enterprise data protection,” which is described as allowing customers to leverage volume groups to execute multivolume snapshots for VMs. These can act as a “crash-consistent backup mechanism” to support disaster recovery and help meet compliance with enterprise data protection policies.

There is also a two-node OpenShift with “fencing” targeted at resource constrained edge environments. This supports the extension of an organization’s hybrid-cloud footprint to those remote locations while maintaining fault tolerance and automated recovery.

Red Hat also updated broader ecosystem support to help “organizations looking to escape costly proprietary hypervisor licenses.” This includes support for the NetApp Shift Toolkit that can help with workload migrations; general availability for storage offload during warm migrations; and adds Microsoft Hyper-V and Amazon EC2 as source providers, “allowing your teams to migrate critical applications from a broader set of environments onto a unified control plane.”

VMware customers in cross-hairs

The updates extend Red Hat’s push to entice potentially tens-of-thousands of disillusioned VMware customers.

Red Hat is viewed as being well positioned to take advantage of that potential outflow.

Forrester last year ranked the vendor’s OpenShift-based container management platform as being extensive and robust, including the ability to support the traditional multicloud needs, Red Hat’s focus on adding new capabilities targeted at AI and virtualization, and its ability to tap into parent company IBM’s broad ecosystem. Nits targeted at Red Hat were limited mostly to cost concerns, with Forrester noting some Red Hat customers were weighing the offering to public cloud-based serverless container runtime and competing multicloud management platforms.

But others are also baiting their hooks.

Nutanix, for instance, has been vocal in attempting to lure VMware fleers by straddling the operational line between that vendor and Red Hat.

Dan Ciruli, VP and GM for cloud native at Nutanix, explained during the vendor’s recent .NEXT event that its latest Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) Metal updates uniquely allow it to provide a dual-support path for containers. The first is the ability to run Kubernetes-managed containers in a VM environment, which takes advantage of virtualized environments, with the other path in running those containers in a bare-metal environment.

“Some vendors have a way to do one and not the other. Some vendors have a way to deploy on bare metal, but they don't have an inherent way to do it in virtual machines. And with NKP Metal, we're now giving our customers the ability from it from a single control plane when provisioning nodes, decide, ‘hey, do I want to provision this with a hypervisor and run a full Nutanix stack and all the goodness that comes with that: enterprise storage with [Acropolis Operating System]; management of VMs, and running in those VMs, by the way, virtualized workloads or containerized workloads, because, of course, we can run containers there, but from that same set of management tools also deploy and manage nodes that are bare metal Kubernetes, where we're running NKP, so that, in itself, is distinguishing features no one else has.”

Ciruli argued this dual-path approach is what separates Nutanix from rivals VMware and Red Hat, a separation emphasized by not naming either of those rivals.

“From some vendor’s perspective, everything should be run in a virtual machine. It's the only way to run. … They like virtual machines so much they put it in the name,” Ciruli said of VMware’s approach without naming VMware.

“And then we have a vendor who is very much trying to eliminate the hypervisor from the stack, … and not necessarily because the industry is clamoring to get rid of the hypervisor, but … they see an opportunity right now because people are unhappy with Broadcom and they could ‘hey, our product can be an alternative,” Ciruli added of Red Hat, again without naming Red Hat.

IBM hit by memory, cybersecurity focus

Red Hat’s latest OpenShift updates also comes as parent company IBM warned about a big customer shift toward supply chain constrained hardware and cybersecurity focused software, a shift that moves away from some of IBM’s core software and infrastructure competencies.

“In the last few weeks of June, we saw clients shift their quarterly capex spend toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases. This dynamic impacted client buying patterns,” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna noted in a “letter to IBM investors” that is available to anyone with an internet connection. “While we anticipated some supply chain related impact in our expectations, we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization. In addition, clients were distracted with rapidly evolving, industrywide cybersecurity concerns in the quarter.”

Kirshna’s post came with IBM releasing “selected preliminary second-quarter 2026 financial results” that showed compromised fiscal performance, which in turn sent IBM’s stock price spiraling. However, it should be noted that Red Hat’s revenues increased 11% sequentially, while IBM’s recently acquired HashiCorp and Confluent divisions “delivered strong performance.”

“While performance in the quarter was below our expectations, we have conviction in the strength of our portfolio and the strategic transformation of our business,” Krishna added. “To remedy challenges this quarter, we are undertaking new initiatives and accelerating others, all to improve our results going forward.”