We continue to see many organizations accelerate their infrastructure modernization plans and choose Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization as their future-ready foundation for traditional virtual machine (VM) workloads. That being said, when you’re tasked with moving hundreds or thousands of legacy VMs into a cloud-native environment, speed and security are critical.The latest release of Red Hat’s migration toolkit for virtualization is version 2.12, and is in line with Red Hat OpenShift 4.22. This new release focuses on advanced storage processing, extending source provider support, and AI optimizations. We are encouraging organizations to shift away from slow network migrations and execute those migrations directly onto intelligent storage layers. This release introduces support for NetApp Shift Toolkit to redefine how fast a migration can actually be.Speed up your migrations with NetApp ShiftIf you are running your source VMs on NetApp ONTAP storage, the NetApp Shift Toolkit integration represents a major milestone when it comes to accelerating your migration timeline. Red Hat customers can now manage their VM migrations within the migration toolkit for virtualization GUI, while Shift Toolkit executes the conversion behind the scenes. This allows customers to use familiar Red Hat tools while benefiting from the capabilities of Shift Toolkit. Shift Toolkit performs the heavy lifting at the storage virtualization layer. It creates an instant clone of your file system within the same storage array by saving data chains across different parts of the drive. Because the source hypervisor can still interact with the original VM while any target modifications are stored separately, you can perform fast, zero-copy cold migrations. The original file is frozen in place, meaning there is no need to stop and copy data across the wire. This results in near-zero downtime and allows you to move workloads in a fraction of the time that a traditional migration would take. The process is illustrated in Figure 1.