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About OKD Virtualization

What you can do with OKD Virtualization

OKD Virtualization is an add-on to OKD that allows you to run and manage virtual machine workloads alongside container workloads.

OKD Virtualization adds new objects into your OKD cluster by using Kubernetes custom resources to enable virtualization tasks. These tasks include:

  • Creating and managing Linux and Windows virtual machines

  • Connecting to virtual machines through a variety of consoles and CLI tools

  • Importing and cloning existing virtual machines

  • Managing network interface controllers and storage disks attached to virtual machines

  • Live migrating virtual machines between nodes

An enhanced web console provides a graphical portal to manage these virtualized resources alongside the OKD cluster containers and infrastructure.

OKD Virtualization is designed and tested to work well with Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation features.

When you deploy OKD Virtualization with OpenShift Data Foundation, you must create a dedicated storage class for Windows virtual machine disks. See Optimizing ODF PersistentVolumes for Windows VMs for details.

You can use OKD Virtualization with the OVN-Kubernetes, OpenShift SDN, or one of the other certified network plugins listed in Certified OpenShift CNI Plug-ins.

OKD Virtualization supported cluster version

OKD Virtualization 4.12 is supported for use on OKD 4.12 clusters. To use the latest z-stream release of OKD Virtualization, you must first upgrade to the latest version of OKD.

Single-node OpenShift differences

You can install OKD Virtualization on a single-node cluster.

When provisioning a single-node OpenShift cluster with the assisted installer, preconfigured persistent storage is deployed automatically.

  • In OKD Virtualization 4.10 and 4.11, the HostPath Provisioner (HPP) is automatically installed.

  • In OKD Virtualization 4.12, the OpenShift Data Foundation Logical Volume Manager Operator is the provided out-of-the-box storage solution. You can also manually deploy using the HPP.

Single-node OpenShift does not support high availability. Be aware of the following differences in functionality from a multiple-node cluster:

  • Pod disruption budgets are not supported.

  • Live migration is not supported.

  • Due to differences in storage behavior, some virtual machine templates are incompatible with single-node OpenShift. To ensure compatibility, templates or virtual machines that use data volumes or storage profiles must not have the eviction strategy set.

Additional resources