This week, thousands of IT leaders will gather in Atlanta for Red Hat Summit. The agenda covers
everything from AI to digital sovereignty, but in the customer conversations I have continued to have
over the past 24 months, a different topic keeps coming up: whether the virtualization platform they’ve been running for years and depend on is still the right foundation for their workloads today, and
whether it sets them up for what’s coming next. Most of them are already evaluating alternatives.
For a long time, virtualisation was a “it and forget it” part of the stack. That isn’t the case anymore. Shifting commercial models and the demands of AI workloads have turned what used to be a routine renewal into an urgent decision. For many, the immediate priority is finding a lower-risk migration path to protect current operations. But as we look toward next week’s discussions at Red Hat Summit, it’s important to recognise that the platform you choose today will serve as the operational foundation for your infrastructure and determine your ability to innovate and meet what the business demands next.
Two-stacks is a problem
As we look toward an AI-driven future, IDC projects the creation of over 1 billion net new applications by 2028. This growth is forcing enterprises to scale their container footprints at an unprecedented rate. However, this progress often creates a “dual stack” challenge, where organisations face the heavy lifting of maintaining separate virtualisation and containerised environments.
This fragmentation typically leads to:
● Inconsistent tooling and disparate team skill sets across teams
● Operational friction when trying to connect traditional VM-based applications with modern
microservice based architectures
● Redundant costs and unnecessary long-term complexity.
A production-tested foundation
When we talk about Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation, a native feature of Red Hat OpenShift, we’re
talking about a technology that has been running production workloads at scale for years. It is built on
KVM, a hypervisor that has provided enterprise-grade stability, security, and broad hardware support
for nearly two decades. KVM powers some of the world’s largest cloud architectures, including the
hyperscalers that dominate CIO conversations.
OpenShift Virtualisation brings that same hypervisor together with KubeVirt, an open source project
with broad industry backing and contributions from more than 2,000 organisations, to let you run virtual machines (VMs) on the same platform as your containerised workloads. The technology underneath the platform isn’t new or unproven; it’s the result of years of community and Red Hat investment, and it’s already running production workloads inside some of the largest enterprises in the world.
Modernising on your terms
The goal isn’t to force a high-risk application rewrite before you’re ready. It’s about a strategic simplification that provides a clear, lower-risk pathway for modernisation.
According to the latest IDC White Paper, sponsored by Red Hat, this approach allows organisations to:
● Protect existing investments: Continue using a validated ecosystem of storage, networking, and
backup integrations so your current infrastructure remains functional.
● Modernise on your terms: Run legacy VMs unchanged while bringing modern practices like
GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines to them from day one.
● Restore predictability: Move to a subscription-based model that offers long-term planning
stability, removing the uncertainty of shifting legacy licensing structures.
The clearest example of this in the IDC paper is One New Zealand. The telco’s principal cloud and
infrastructure architect, Umer Younis, walked IDC through what changed after they moved to OpenShift
Virtualisation. Using the Red Hat Migration Factory with Ansible Automation, alongside Red Hat
Professional Services, they have been converting existing VMs at pace. The same staff now manages
both VMs and containers. Licensing costs have come down through the Red Hat subscription model.
Time to market is faster because the pipelines are consistent across both workload types. And the open source foundation of KVM and KubeVirt protects the company against being locked into another single vendor’s commercial decisions down the road.
The platform provides flexibility as well. OpenShift Virtualisation is also available as a managed service
through AWS, Microsoft Azure, and other leading public cloud providers, so the same operational model travels with your workloads, on premises, at the edge, or in the public cloud.
The bottom line
As you prepare your agenda for Summit and reassess your virtualisation strategy, the question isn’t simply “Where do I move my VMs?” The real question is: “What foundation gives me the most
flexibility for the future?”
By unifying VMs and containers under a single modern platform, you can increase hardware density and reduce physical footprints. This isn't just about technical efficiency; it directly supports corporate sustainability goals while eliminating the cost of managing parallel, disconnected stacks.
For a deeper dive into the technical stack, the One New Zealand case study, and architectural
convergence ahead of next week’s event, read the full IDC White Paper: A Proven Modern Virtualization Technical Stack.
