About
Transitioning your infrastructure shouldn't feel like deciphering a new language. This concise guide helps VMware administrators efficiently manage virtual machines (VMs) within the powerful OpenShift platform.
The Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization for VMware administrators cheat sheet bridges the gap by directly mapping familiar VMware vSphere features and concepts to their OpenShift Virtualization counterparts across several key areas:
- Storage: From datastores to PersistentVolumes, understand where your VM disks live and how storage is managed in OpenShift.
- Networking: Demystify OpenShift network policies by seeing how to access features like network configuration, software-defined networking, and virtual machine connectivity.
- Compute resources: Grasp compute concepts across monitoring, migration, resource balancing, and more in OpenShift, drawing parallels to vCenter and vMotion.
- Observability: Learn how OpenShift's monitoring and alerting tools relate to functions across VMware vSphere.
- Virtual machine components: See the direct mapping of VM tools, NIC types, SCSI controllers, snapshot functionalities, and more.
This cheat sheet provides insight into features and functionalities found across both Red Hat OpenShift and VMware. It includes feature mapping charts of commonly used features and OpenShift menu mapping charts to better understand selection items in OpenShift.
It is important to note that OpenShift is conceptually different in select areas from VMware to achieve the same or similar outcomes. The versions that are used throughout are based on OpenShift 4.18 and VMware vSphere 8.0. Refer to the Red Hat OpenShift and VMware documentation for the most up-to-date information.
Note some features might differ depending on the OpenShift edition in use. For further questions on these features and access to them, please reach out to your Red Hat account team.
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Excerpt
Feature | VMware | OpenShift |
Resource balancing | Dynamic resource scheduling (DRS) | |
Host / VM metrics | vCenter, Aria Operations | OpenShift Metrics and Monitoring, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management |
Compute Live migration | vMotion | |
CPU overcommitment | Yes | |
Memory overcommitment methods | Ballooning and transparent page sharing (TPS), Swap | |
(Co)scheduling constraints | Affinity rules for VMs-to-VMs and VMs-to-hosts | |
Node failure | Node failure detection and VM rescheduling happens within 15-30 seconds, even without vCenter. | Supported through fencing agents' environments. See KCS for HA configuration. |
Dynamic reconfiguration | CPU, memory, disk, network and some additional hardware is supported for hot add/remove and reconfiguration. | Hot add supports storage, CPU, SR-IOV and Bridge Network, and memory. |
Compute acceleration | PCI passthrough for CPUs, VGPU supported. | GPU, generic PCI passthrough, and CPU passthrough supported, (NVIDIA) vGPU supported. |
Template management | Template VMs, OVA/OVF deployment, and content libraries offer the ability to provision VMs using a simplified process. | Catalog to manage boot sources, VM templates, and instance types. VMs can be created from VM templates, instance types, or declarative raw VM definitions when associated with a specific boot source. |
VM export/import | Import and export VMs using the OVF and OVA formats. | Import and export OVA/VMs using migration toolkit for virtualization (export example). |
