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Many network functions used in the telecommunications industry have typically been deployed in virtualized environments. The transition to containerized network functions is an ongoing process. In the short term, deployment and management of workloads running on virtual machines is required. The upstream KubeVirt project has enabled the deployment and management of virtual machines alongside containerized workloads in Kubernetes by providing the Virtual Machine Custom Resource Definition (VMCRD) resource, which defines the properties of virtual machines that are created and managed by Kubernetes. In OpenShift Container Platform 4.6, OpenShift Virtualization based on the upstream KubeVirt project enables customers to deploy and manage virtual machines through CLI tools and through the OpenShift web console. OpenShift Virtualization lets customers deploy virtual machines running Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6, 7, or 8. Use of OpenShift Virtualization requires that storage be provisioned either through OpenShift Data Foundation or using a Dell EMC storage array such as Unity or PowerScale. SR-IOV virtual functions can also be attached directly to virtual machines that are provisioned by OpenShift Virtualization, in a way that is similar to the way virtual functions are provided to normal pods.
The KubeVirt project, which is incorporated into OpenShift Virtualization, provides the VMCRD to define virtual machine properties and the machinery to manage and deploy virtual machines in a Kubernetes environment. The following KubeVirt components are implemented in OpenShift Virtualization.
The following figure shows the OpenShift Virtualization architecture: