Red Hat is offering qualifying customers the first year of OpenShift Virtualization subscriptions free to help counter overlapping platform costs becoming a hurdle for enterprise virtualization migrations.

The promotion eschews OpenShift Virtualization subscription fees for year one of a three-year agreement, with Red Hat customers still paying for existing infrastructure, hardware, migration work, training, and deployment.

Simon Seagrave, Red Hat director of OpenShift product marketing, argued in an announcement that many infrastructure teams spend roughly two years evaluating virtualization alternatives following licensing and pricing changes, but ultimately defer migrations as budgets and staff are increasingly directed toward AI projects.

This is as enterprises have to account for a multitude of elements during the modernization journey: backup and disaster recovery, storage, networking and segmentation policies, monitoring, application support requirements, training and change management, elements that can extend migrations into a multi-year timeline.

“You keep paying for the platform you are leaving while funding the migration, the training, and the rollout of the platform replacing it. For many organizations, that overlap is what makes an otherwise sensible migration difficult to justify,” Seagrave wrote. “A free first year is not a reason to choose a platform on its own. The point is that by eliminating that financial overlap, the decision goes back to the technology, the migration path, and what the platform delivers for your business long-term."

Seagrave also positioned OpenShift Virtualization as a common platform for virtual machines (VMs) and containers following its recent refresh with the release of OpenShift 4.20. That release also added central processing unit (CPU) load-aware rebalancing, Arm architecture support, and support for Oracle Cloud bare-metal deployments, lending it toward distributed workloads and AI-centric use cases.

"Migrate what you need at a pace your team can sustain and know that the platform underneath is ready when containers, hybrid cloud, AI, or edge become relevant. Nobody is asking you to modernize everything because a renewal date moved," Seagrave noted.