Managing virtualized workloads alongside containerized applications remains a persistent challenge for IT operations, often creating siloed management environments. At Red Hat Summit 2026, I had the opportunity to take the stage during the OpenShift Spotlight session and demonstrate how Red Hat OpenShift is bridging this divide, by allowing organizations to treat a virtual machine (VM) and a container as first-class citizens on a single platform.
Alan Cowles presents during the OpenShift Spotlight at Red Hat Summit 2026.Bridging the virtual-container gapMy demonstration focused on a fictional Travel Agency application running seven virtual machines. This legacy application supported the booking and billing functionality and had VMs dedicated to the different sub-functions required for the application to run. For example, there was a VM dedicated to running an application for booking rental cars, while another focused solely on flight reservations, with still another dedicated to arranging accommodations at hotels.It's been observed that, in most cases, organizations are forced to maintain separate management consoles for VMs and containers. This is because they either host their container platforms within their virtualization solution, or run both on bare-metal infrastructure side-by-side, managed by separate teams. This can create a "toggle tax" that drains operational efficiency. In the demonstration, I showcased how Red Hat OpenShift mitigates this by integrating virtual machines directly with the platform's native features like service mesh.Because virtual machines in OpenShift are running in containers themselves, it’s easy to apply any advanced tooling provided by OpenShift to virtualized workloads just as you would to any containerized workload. With Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh, I injected sidecar containers to the running VMs, and thus provided additional functionality that was previously unavailable. Initially, the traffic graph was empty—the sidecar containers hadn't been injected yet! With a quick visit to the command line on my imaginary keyboard, I was able to inject a service mesh sidecar container, and within a few moments, the environment transformed. The VM’s pod view expanded from two containers to three, adding an istio-proxy container alongside the guest-console and compute containers that make up the VM. Once injected, the service mesh graph began to populate with new data, and provided a comprehensive visualization of the entire application flow, including database and support services.
