As organizations increasingly shift towards hybrid cloud, many are expected to face the following challenge: how to migrate virtual workloads from traditional virtualization platforms, like vSphere, oVirt or OpenStack, to a hybrid cloud solution, like OKD? There are a variety of strategies and tools available for such a transition to choose from. In this session, we will see one of these strategies, in which workloads keep running in virtual machines alongside containers on top of OKD, based on our recent experience in migrating real-world virtual machines from oVirt to KubeVirt using Forklift.

In mid-2023, our engineering team at Red Hat took the task of migrating all the virtual machines from an internal oVirt environment to a new OKD deployment. Our oVirt environment was in use for more than a decade, running hundreds of production VMs as well as VMs for development purposes. Given the nature of the workloads, it was impractical, and in some cases not even possible, to containerize the workloads. Therefore, we decided to go ahead and take Forklift for a spin, and move the VMs to run on OKD using KubeVirt, with minimal changes to the workloads that run inside them.

At first glance, this kind of migration appears fairly straightforward, doesn't it? Especially considering we now have access to mature tools for VM migrations, like virt-v2v and ovirt-imageio, that are orchestrated by the Forklift operator. And specifically, when migrating from oVirt to KubeVirt, the same virtualization stack is used on both ends. However, in reality, the migration process was more complex than anticipated, with quite a few factors to consider and operations that were needed to complement the functionality in Forklift.

This session presents tips and insights for migrations from legacy virtualization platforms to OKD, through our test case of transitioning from oVirt to OKD using Forklift. Without assuming prior knowledge of the platforms and tools discussed, we will cover the entire migration process using Forklift, and explain scripts we implemented and strategies we used for a smooth transition to OKD. Join us to learn from our journey, so by the end of this session you will have a clear understanding of the necessary steps to successfully execute your organization's transition projects.