See all blog posts in this series:

1. OpenShift Virtualization on IBM Cloud, part 1: Introduction
2. OpenShift Virtualization on IBM Cloud, part 2: Becoming familiar with VPC
3. OpenShift Virtualization on IBM Cloud, part 3: Deploying ROKS, ODF, and OCP Virt
4. OpenShift Virtualization on IBM Cloud, part 4: Creating a virtual machine
5. OpenShift Virtualization on IBM Cloud, part 5: Migrating a virtual machine
6. OpenShift Virtualization on IBM Cloud, part 6: Backup and restore
7. OpenShift Virtualization on IBM Cloud, part 7: Dynamic resource scheduling

In the VMware world, there is presently a lot of interest in alternative virtualization solutions such as RedHat’s OpenShift Virtualization. In the past I’ve used RedHat Virtualization, or RHEV. RedHat has discontinued their RHEV offering and is focusing their virtualization efforts and investment in OpenShift Virtualization instead. In order to become familiar with OpenShift Virtualization I resolved to experiment with it via IBM Cloud’s managed OpenShift offering, RedHat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, affectionately known as “ROKS” (RedHat OpenShift Kubernetes Service) in my circles.

My colleague Neil Taylor was tremendously helpful in providing background information to familiarize myself with the technology for the purposes of my experiment. He has written a series of blog posts with the purpose of familiarizing VMware administrators like myself with OpenShift Virtualization and specifically the form it takes in IBM Cloud’s managed offering. If you are interested in following along with my experiment, you should read his articles first:

1. OpenShift Virtualization on IBM Cloud ROKS: a VMware administrator’s guide to storage
2. OpenShift Virtualization on IBM Cloud ROKS: a VMware administrator’s guide to networking
3. OpenShift Virtualization on IBM Cloud ROKS: a VMware administrator’s guide to migrating VMware VMs to OpenShift Virtualization
4. OpenShift Virtualization on IBM Cloud ROKS: Advanced Networking – A VMware Administrator’s Guide

I expect that in the future we will see IBM Cloud ROKS adopting the new user-defined networking capabilities that are coming to OpenShift Virtualization soon, but I expect it will take some time to operationalize these capabilities in the IBM Cloud virtual private cloud (VPC) environment. In the meantime I’m content to experiment with virtualization within the limits of Calico networking.