Technical OpenShift Virtualization Questions

The conversation with the financial services firm covered a range of questions. Below, you will see the questions organized by type. As you review them, think about how they would assist you in assembling detailed information about the current environment of the financial services customer.

General

  • How many VMware clusters do you have running?

    • Are they in multiple locations?

    • How many hypervisors per cluster?

      • Are there any variations in hardware configurations across hypervisors within the same cluster(s)?

      • How many sockets per hypervisor?

  • How many VMs are you running in your cluster(s)?

    • What is the total number of virtual CPUs and RAM allocated to these VMs?

    • What type of workloads are running in VMs today?

    • What’s the approximate percentage of VMs running on Windows and percentage of VMs running on RHEL?

    • What type of software and software applications do you host in your environments? (COTS/GOTS/MOTS/In-house/other)

      • Specifically, could you provide examples of the most critical applications and their importance to your organization’s operations?

      • Would these applications need to be migrated hot or are cold migrations possible?

    • Do you have any workloads requiring compute acceleration (rendering, AI/ML, remote 3D visualization) that would benefit from GPUs?

    • Are you planning on migrating all of your VMs to a new platform?

      • (Follow-up) What is your timeline (if any) for completing this migration

      • (Follow-up) Do you foresee any potential challenges or roadblocks in achieving this e.g. people assets, skills gaps, security requirements, etc.?

  • Are you leveraging any of the following VMware features? If so please explain your use case.

    • HA (High Availability)

    • DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduling)

    • VSAN (Software defined storage)

    • NSX (Software defined networking)

    • Distributed Switching

    • Snapshots

    • SRM (Site Recovery Manager)

    • Aria Automation / VRealize

Networking

  • Networking Config

    • How is networking currently configured in your VMware environment?

    • Are there any specific network configs or VLANs that need to be replicated in the OpenShift Virtualization environment?

  • Network Security

    • What security measures are in place for network traffic within your VMware environment?

    • Are there any specific firewall rules or network segmentation requirements that need to be replicated in OpenShift Virtualization?

  • DNS/Name Resolution

    • How are DNS and NR currently managed?

    • Are there any additional or specific DNS configurations/requirements that need to be addressed in the OpenShift Virtualization environment?

  • Load Balancing/Service Discovery

    • How are they currently doing it?

    • Are there any additional or specific requirements for service discovery, external lb, routing, etc?

  • Network Performance

    • Does your org have any requirements for network performance and latency?

    • Any performance-critical applications or workloads relying on low-latency networking?

  • External Connectivity Requirements

    • Any requirements for external connectivity for apps hosted in the OpenShift Virtualization environment?

  • Network Monitoring and Troubleshooting

    • What tools or processes do you have in place for monitoring and troubleshooting your network?

Storage

  • What type of storage hardware is in use (vendor/model)? Netapp, Pure, Dell, HPE, etc

    • Motivation for the question: Will this storage work with OCP?

      • Does it have a CSI Driver?

      • Does it work and is supported on OCP?

    • Can you confirm if RWX storage is (or will be) available? How is it (or will it be) provisioned? (Required for “OCP-V Live Migration” aka “vMotion”)

  • What storage protocol are you using to present storage to your clusters (NFS, iSCSI, Direct Attached)? (Please provide configurations for each cluster if there are multiple clusters)

    • Could you also elaborate on any performance and/or latency requirements for storage access?

  • How much storage capacity is presented/consumed to your clusters? (Please provide configurations for each cluster if there are multiple clusters)

    • Do you see this need increasing in the future? Do you have storage hungry workloads planned?

  • Is there any additional storage capacity for migration efforts?

User Access and Authentication

  • How are they currently managed in your vmware environment

  • Any specific requirements for user authentication, access control, SSO, etc.?

Compliance and Governance

  • Any regulatory compliance requirements/benchmarks that need to be considered/that customers are beholden to?

Backup and DR

  • What backup and disaster recovery solutions are you using today that we could potentially leverage in the new environment?

  • What type of redundancy and fault tolerance mechanisms are currently in place?

    • Application

    • Storage

    • Networking

    • DR Cluster failover

Training and Skill Development

  • What is your team’s experience level with managing Kubernetes?

  • Are there any existing training and/or certification initiatives for Kubernetes/OpenShift within their organization?

  • Do/Will your IT teams require training or “upskilling” in Kubernetes (or more specifically OpenShift) and OpenShift Virtualization?

Integration with Existing Systems

  • Are there any third-party systems, tools, and/or applications that need to integrate with OpenShift Virtualization (or your workloads running on OpenShift Virtualization)? Please elaborate on each.

Automation

  • Image Provisioning and Configuration

    • How are VM images currently provisioned and configured in your VMware environment?

    • Do you use tools like cloud-init or sysprep for image customization and configuration?

  • Automated VM Provisioning

    • Are there any requirements for automated VM provisioning and/or orchestration in the new OpenShift Virt environment?

    • Do you have requirements for bulk deployment of VMs (such as deploying multiple instances of the same VM template)??

      • What tools or processes are you currently using to accomplish this?

  • GitOps and CI/CD Integration??

    • Any plans (or expectations) to integrate GitOps principles or CI/CD pipelines into the management of your workloads/VMs in OpenShift Virtualization?

Future Looking

  • What is the timeline you are looking to have the migration started and what is your ideal completion time frame?

  • Do you have a budget allocated for this migration effort?

  • Are there plans to modernize any application into containers during the migration effort or shortly thereafter?

  • Do you anticipate any long-term growth or expansion of your app portfolio that may impact storage, networking, etc. requirements beyond the initial migration phase?