Red Hat offers virtual machine admins a new migration toolkit

Red Hat has launched the latest in a series of migration toolkits to help customers move their infrastructure onto its OpenShift cloud environment.

The latest is a virtualization migration toolkit that helps transport virtual machines to its platform at scale, providing customers with an easy way to transfer their virtualized infrastructure.

Customers begin by entering the access credentials for their source and destination environments into the tool and mapping the source and destination infrastructure. The tool lets them filter the virtual machines on the source infrastructure by criteria, including names and folders, to find those serving specific applications. Customers then define a migration plan for the virtual machines.

Before setting the scripted migration in motion, customers can use a built-in migration analytics tool that spots potential migration issues with specific virtual machines and offers recommendations to solve migration problems.

OpenShift is the IBM-owned company's container orchestration system. It offers a layer of extra functionality over the commonly used Kubernetes container management platform, including more graphical user interface and security features.

Containers are an evolution of virtual machine technology that uses a single virtual server operating system to host a range of pared-down containers that share a single kernel. This makes containers smaller and more agile than virtual machines.

Although OpenShift targets containers, Red Hat launched OpenShift Virtualization technology in August 2020 to cover virtual machines. Based on the open source KubeVirt project, OpenShift Virtualization allows companies to run virtual machines, containers, and serverless applications alongside each other on the same platform.

This new migration toolkit joins several others from Red Hat, including its migration toolkit for applications, which handles large-scale application modernization and migration and handles platform upgrades and cloud deployments.

Red Hat also offers a migration toolkit for containers that migrates applications between container clusters, allowing customers to move container applications between OpenShift platforms.