Red Hat launched general availability of its migration for virtualization platform to help enterprises refactor workloads from virtual machines (VMs) into its cloud-native focused OpenShift platform. The move also continues what has been an ongoing push by cloud providers to help enterprises in their digital transformation efforts.

James Labocki, senior director of product management for Red Hat, explained in an interview that the migration tool acts as an operator within an OpenShift bare metal environment. Once installed, customers can use the migration tool dashboard to select which VM workloads they want to move into OpenShift, provide the credentials for those workloads, and the system will then discover the VMs, the network, and the data stores backing those VMs that can then be automatically migrated.

“That allows you to make sure that when you move VMs, or if someone else moves them, then you can ensure that the networks and storage that they were expecting to have are going to be there,” Labocki said. “It kind of makes it more difficult for you to shoot yourself in the foot by migrating somewhere where there's no network connectivity or storage.”

The platform also has new on-premises migration capabilities that can detect potential migration issues before executing the transfer. This includes the ability to provide insight into solving those issues. It also supports “warm migrations,” which means that “we’re going to wait to copy the disk and all the deltas until the last possible moment and then you say cutover, and then we copy the last bit of changes and flip it so it minimizes downtime,” Labocki added.

Red Hat has offered the migration tool since since last year when it launched its OpenShift 4.5 update, but this GA launch includes the ability to move multiple VMs at a time. Labocki explained that “these are some of the requirements we're getting from enterprises as far as what would make this more useful: mass migration and more migration are two of those things that we're bringing in.”

The platform also relies heavily on the upstream-focused Forklift variant of the recently launched Konveyor Project. That project is an overarching platform that includes several components targeted at various migration models. Those components, or subprojects, as Red Hat calls them, use Red Hat’s Kubernetes Operators deployment model and are focused on re-hosting, re-platforming, or re-factoring legacy applications.

Forklift focuses on migrating VMs to Kubernetes and can also migrate VMs into the open source KubeVirt platform to provide a unified approach for developers to support containerized workloads. KubeVirt can also manage VM-based workloads that are difficult to integrate into a containerized environment.

The new platform joins a pair of already launched Red Hat toolkits: one for applications and one for containers.

The toolkit for applications provides open source tools that can support the migration legacy applications into cloud-native platforms or into Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform or its Red Hat build on Quarkus. The toolkit for containers focuses on moving stateful and stateless applications from a source cluster to a target cluster for increased mobility.

One limitation on the migration toolkit is that Red Hat does not have any direct agreements with the large cloud providers for the hosting of the re-factored workloads. Thus, users will have to run a cloud-specific hypervisor on top of those workloads.

“We decided to start on prem because that's where we had the greatest demand, so we said we'll start there and then work our way toward the public cloud,” Labocki explained on the timing.

The Red Hat launch continues what has been a growing focus by vendors and cloud providers to supply enterprises with a model to drive their digital transformation efforts into the cloud.

Google, for instance, has its Migrate for Anthos platform that encourage the migration of workloads into its Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). It allows users to take a VM from on-premises or Google Compute Engine (GCE) and move it directly into containers running in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Those VMs can also be migrated directly from Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 and Microsoft Azure into containers running in GKE.

Oracle has a similar model with its Oracle Cloud Lift Services.

Labocki noted that Red Hat’s use of the open source Konveyor Project will allow customers to remain free of being locked into a specific cloud provider’s ecosystem.

“The community approach to this with conveyer is to ensure that if I was a system integrator or I was a partner or consultant or even an end user or a customer, I want my skillset to be in something that's going to be broadly transferable and not tied to just one vendor’s tool,” Labocki said. “We have tools that people could use to rehost, replatform, or refactor applications to Kubernetes and these cloud-native technologies that are broadly transferable.”