Master thesis : Assessing Bare-Metal Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as a VMware Alternative for Service Providers

Abstract

Changes in VMware’s licensing and subscription model have encouraged service providers to examine alternative platforms for private cloud virtualization. This thesis assesses whether bare-metal Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, com- bined with OpenShift Virtualization, can support virtual machine workloads in a service provider environment. Using KEYES’s VMware-based private cloud as a reference, the study com- pares the operational requirements of production virtualization with the mecha- nisms available in OpenShift. The evaluation covers networking, storage, live and storage migration, workload placement, maintenance operations, high availability, and workload migration. Particular attention is given to how these functions can be implemented through Kubernetes-native components such as Multus, NMState, OpenShift Data Foundation, OpenShift Virtualization, and the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization. The results show that OpenShift can provide many of the core functionalities expected from a VMware-based environment, including VLAN-based network seg- mentation, multiple storage integration models, live migration, dynamic workload rebalancing, and virtual machine failover. However, these capabilities are distributed across several OpenShift and Kubernetes components rather than being exposed through a single integrated virtualization layer. This increases architectural com- plexity and requires a different operational model. This thesis concludes that OpenShift Virtualization is a viable technical alter- native to VMware for service providers, particularly when virtual machines and cloud-native workloads are to be consolidated on a unified platform. Nevertheless, its suitability depends on the organization’s capacity to manage the additional com- plexity introduced by the Kubernetes-based architecture.