Welcome to Experience OpenShift Virtualization: Advanced Operations and Automation!
Introduction
In today’s dynamic IT landscape, organizations are grappling with the complexities of managing traditional virtualization alongside the demands of cloud-native innovation. This workshop allows IT professionals to confidently navigate this hybrid reality, demonstrating how Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, coupled with Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kuberentes provides a unified, efficient, and secure platform for all workloads, whether virtual or container-based.
In this lab, which is a follow-up to our very popular Experience OpenShift Virtualization Roadshow lab, we intend to equip you with the knowledge and tools to manage your environment and perform critical operational tasks often required of virtual machine administrators from day-2 onward. This ensures that your virtualized workloads are efficiently managed and maintained long after the initial deployment.
Lab Story
Imagine you are the Lead Platform Engineer or VM administrator at "Legacy Systems Inc.," a company with a strong foundation in traditional virtualized workloads but a growing need to modernize and respond to rapidly evolving market demands. Your CIO recently mandated a strategic shift: consolidate all virtual and containerized workloads onto a unified platform to reduce operational complexity, improve agility, and ensure compliance. This directive was partly driven by recent market changes in the virtualization vendor space, prompting a reassessment of existing investments and strategies. You’ve chosen Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization as your strategic platform for its ability to migrate VMs and unify your workloads on a consistent application platform. Now, your team faces the critical task of mastering Day 2 operations in this new environment.
Red Hat Products Included
OpenShift Virtualization enables you to bring virtual machines onto a modern, Kubernetes-based infrastructure. It enables the development and delivery of new applications as well as the modernization of existing ones and can create applications that consist of virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions - all managed together using Kubernetes-native tools and paradigms.
Ansible Automation Platform allows platform engineering and DevOps teams to create, manage, and scale automation across physical, cloud, virtual, and edge environments. With Ansible Automation Platform, you can drive consistency and manage compliance with automated workflows that span infrastructure, network components, applications, storage, security, ITSM, and more.
Red Hat Advanced Cluster Managment for Kubernetes offers end-to-end management, visibility, and control of your entire fleet from a single console, with operational policies built in. Extend the value of Red Hat OpenShift® by deploying apps, managing multiple clusters, and enforcing policies across multiple clusters deployed to datacenter, cloud, and edge environments.
Who Will Benefit Most from attending this Lab?
This workshop is designed for Virtual Machine Administrators, Virtual Infrastructure Administrators, Platform Engineers, and IT Operations teams looking to optimize their virtualization strategy, streamline operations, and prepare for future application modernization.
What Content is Covered in this Lab?
This lab consists of five main sections:
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Performance, Scalability, and Troubleshooting: In this section we will take a look at some of the performance metrics on our Red Hat OpenShift Cluster, we will simulate a high load scenario, and we will determine how to troubleshoot and mitigate the issue by scaling our resources appropriately with the tools and resources at our disposal within Red Hat OpenShift, and OpenShift Virtualization.
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Security and Compliance: In this section we make use of the Red Hat OpenShift Compliance Operator to ensure that our cluster infrastructure meets the security standards in place at our business. We will also introduce the use of the integrated RBAC controls in Red Hat OpenShift to create additional user accounts and assign them each specific management capabilities within the cluster to assist us with role and duty segregation at our company.
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Advanced Networking and Security: In this section we will utilize the Network Observability Operator to investigate network utilization and create custom graphs of traffic flows. We will then demonstrate that we can craft specific network policies to help shape and secure our networking traffic both in and out of the cluster, and between projects internally.
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Automation of Virtual Machines: In this section we cover a variety of daily management tasks that an administrator would be expected to perform in their environment, and demonstrate how many of these tasks can be automated easily with Ansible Automation Platform.
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Advanced Management of Virtual Workloads: In this section we will introduce Red Hat Advanced Cluster Managment for Kubernetes, which allows you to discover and manage your many Red Hat OpenShift clusters from a central hub cluster through a single pane of glass interface. We can use RHACM to observe and manage these remote clusters and their workloads whether they be container or virtual machine based.
Requirements for the Lab Environment
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Participant needs to have their own computer with a web browser and internet access.
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Chromium based browsers are recommended as some copy/paste functions don’t work in Firefox for the time being.
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Remote access console uses the US keyboard layout by default, so it’s good to know where special characters reside for other country’s layouts, or to use the copy/paste function in a supported browser.