Red Hat offers OpenShift Virtualization Engine, Kubernetes Connectivity Link

Red Hat has made both its Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine and  Red Hat Connectivity Link software generally available. The company also announced Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine is a new edition of Red Hat OpenShift that provides a way to access OpenShift virtualization capabilities. Red Hat Connectivity Link is a Kubernetes-native connectivity technology for managing applications across connected cloud environments. Red Hat announced the availability of both on January 15.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine provides a tailored option for deploying, managing, and scaling virtual machines, removing features unrelated to VM management. This ensures organizations can maximize the value of OpenShift Virtualization while aligning with specific infrastructure needs, Red Hat said. Additionally, the virtualization engine delivers a virtualization-only solution for deploying and scaling virtual machines.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine can run on on-premises hardware that supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux and on bare metal cloud services including AWS bare metal instances. To ease migration, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine includes access to Red Hat’s intuitive migration tool—the migration toolkit for virtualization—that assists in transitioning from other virtualization platforms. To unify virtual machine management at scale and limit sprawl, Red Hat is also introducing Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization. A new edition of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, it provides focused access to Advanced Cluster Management’s existing features designed to centralize VM lifecycle management

Red Hat Connectivity Link, meanwhile, integrates traffic management, policy enforcement, and role-based access directly with Kubernetes, to enhance security and compliance across layers of application infrastructure, Red Hat said. Application development and platform engineering teams can manage application connectivity across single- and multi-cluster Kubernetes environments. Red Hat Connectivity Link can reduce complexity by consolidating functions such as traffic routing, security, and policy management functions into a single Kubernetes-native solution.

According to Red Hat, the adoption of cloud-native architectures, containers, and Kubernetes has fostered an “explosion” of applications, services, and endpoints. In turn, this has increased the need for and challenges of configuring and governing connections between these components. Applications can span Kubernetes clusters, data centers, and cloud providers.

Technology evolutions in generative AI and edge deployments are adding complexity and introducing new requirements for security and traffic management, said Red Hat. With many organizations running applications across multiple clouds and on-premise environments, and deploying containers and virtual machines, managing application connectivity can be complicated, error-prone, and inefficient, the company said. Red Hat Connectivity Link provides a pathway to application connectivity with a unified environment for development and platform teams to manage connectivity. Red Hat Connectivity Link is based on the Kuadrant project, which provides Kubernetes-native controllers, services, and APIs providing gateway policies for existing Gateway API providers.