There is a growing trend in the enterprise around reevaluating where and how to host your workloads. Whether it’s to better align on cost optimization, performance, or new compliance requirements, or it’s in response to a recent turbulence in the virtualization market, businesses are taking a hard look at where workloads are running and what virtualization ecosystem to commit to.
New regulations coming online, such as the European Union’s Digital Operational Resiliency Act (DORA) as well as increasing resiliency and recoverability requirements for cyber insurance, are also signaling the need for potential change—and diversification. When you have your “digital eggs” in one basket, you are at the mercy of a single vendor and how they choose to take their products and services forward.
Given the culmination of triggers, it’s no surprise that 43% of organizations are very or extremely likely to switch to a different or additional hypervisor in the next three years. F5’s 2025 State of Application Strategy Report also shows that 79% of organizations are moving apps from public clouds back to on-premises or colocation environments.
“Together with Red Hat, F5 can enable an alternative to current virtualization platforms and a simplified migration experience to anywhere you want to host your workloads.”
But change can be expensive, and the more technical debt or dependencies there are on an inflexible ecosystem, the more disruptive moving to a new platform can be to the business.
F5 partnerships with virtualization platform providers offer a path towards diversification, or even a wholesale transition, depending on your strategy.
Streamline virtualized workload management with Red Hat
Red Hat OpenShift allows organizations to manage both your Kubernetes estate as well as your virtualization estate through a single pane of glass. OpenShift incorporates Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), an open-source virtualization technology that allows Linux operating systems to function as a hypervisor. It also utilizes KubeVirt, another open-source project, which makes it possible to run, deploy, and manage VMs with a Kubernetes orchestration platform using container-native packaging.
Choice in where you run your workload is also important, whether it’s on premises, co-located, in a hosted private cloud, or in a hyperscale cloud. Ideally, you have the flexibility to cater to both the demands of each individual workload, as well as support pan-IT initiatives such as reducing technical debt or drawing down data center investments. Red Hat OpenShift can operate in any environment, creating a consistent management and orchestration model and removing a lot of the complexity that comes with siloed management and technology stacks in a hybrid multicloud landscape.
Combine Red Hat with F5 solutions to drive hybrid multicloud portability
Through our strategic 10+ year partnership, F5 has a dedicated alliance team with deep knowledge of Red Hat technologies and solutions. With Red Hat and the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform, organizations can obtain an alternative to current virtualization platforms and a simplified migration experience to anywhere they want to host their workloads.
F5 BIG-IP customers reconsidering their on-premises Broadcom investments can evaluate Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and the bundled OVN-Kubernetes component, an open source technology for Kubernetes cluster layer 2 networking, while continuing to leverage BIG-IP for advanced load balancing. BIG-IP also offers a fast track to the new environment with simple layer 2 migrations, removing a major pain point in the transition.
For customers who wish to shift their workloads to the cloud, F5 Distributed Cloud Services in conjunction with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization can deliver a full stack of cloud-based virtualization and networking capabilities that can replace VMware vSphere, VMware vSphere Networking, and VMware NSX software-defined networking. The combination brings a host of security functions including web app and API protection (WAAP), bot protection, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) defenses, as well as primary and secondary DNS and global server load balancing.
Once moved to Red Hat OpenShift and Distributed Cloud Services, workloads become portable and can run where they need to, with policies that follow the application and consistent enforcement from end to end. The result is an accelerated migration that shortens the time to cloud economics.
Are you reconsidering your virtualization choices? Contact F5 to learn the options. Visit our F5 and Red Hat webpage to find out more.
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