Red Hat offers free OpenShift Virtualization to cut migration costs

Red Hat is offering qualifying customers the first year of OpenShift Virtualization subscriptions free, seeking to address a major financial obstacle in enterprise virtualization migrations. This promotion waives subscription fees for the initial year of a three-year commitment, though customers remain responsible for existing infrastructure, hardware, migration, training, and deployment expenses.

Many infrastructure teams spend considerable time evaluating virtualization alternatives, often deferring migrations due to budget and staff reallocations towards AI projects. The complexity of modernization journeys, involving elements like backup, disaster recovery, storage, and networking, can extend migrations over multiple years.

Addressing Migration Overlap

Simon Seagrave, Red Hat’s director of OpenShift product marketing, highlighted the financial burden of maintaining a legacy platform while simultaneously funding a new one. “You keep paying for the platform you are leaving while funding the migration, the training, and the rollout of the platform replacing it. For many organizations, that overlap is what makes an otherwise sensible migration difficult to justify,” Seagrave stated.

He added, “The point is that by eliminating that financial overlap, the decision goes back to the technology, the migration path, and what the platform delivers for your business…