Red Hat OpenShift improves virtualization support

Red Hat OpenShift 4.18, the latest version of the company’s Kubernetes-powered application platform, has arrived, with enhancements designed to simplify management of virtual machines and containers. Delivering consistency across cloud-native, virtual machine (VM)-based, and traditional applications is a key goal of the update, Red Hat said.

Highlights of the release include promoting user-defined networks (UDN) from technology preview status to GA, a first step in bringing data center networking concepts into Kubernetes. UDN improves the flexibility and segmentation capability of the default Layer 3 Kubernetes pod network by enabling custom Layer 2, Layer 3, and localnet network segments for container pods and VMs using the default OpenShift OVN-Kubernetes networking, Red Hat said. Additionally, UDN has been enhanced with Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) support, which improves segmentation and supports uses such as VM static IP assignment and stronger multi-tenancy.

OpenShift 4.18 also brings VM live storage migration from technology preview to GA, with additional enhancements for non-disruptive movement of data between storage devices and storage classes while a VM is running, and previews tree-view navigation that enables logical grouping of VMs to folders, allowing more granular grouping. Red Hat also introduced the OpenShift Virtualization Engine, a version of OpenShift designed for running VMs only, and announced support for OpenShift bare-metal deployments on Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Bare-metal OpenShift installations already were supported on AWS.

Also in OpenShift 4.18, security features have been added including a secret container storage interface (CSI) driver, which provides a vendor-agnostic solution for managing credentials and sensitive information for applications. Workloads can access external secrets managers without storing secrets on the cluster, enhancing security, and reducing risk. Also, Secret Store CSI Driver enhances complementary solutions, such as OpenShift GitOps and OpenShift Pipelines, enabling them to consume secrets from an external secrets manager in a more secure way, Red Hat said.

Information on upgrading to OpenShift 4.18 can be found at access.redhat.com.