Modern virtualization strategies are evolving rapidly. As organizations embrace Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization as a strategic platform for running both their virtual machines (VMs) and containers, one challenge consistently rises to the top - how to migrate at scale without adding complexity, risk and extended business downtime?
That's where the combined power and native integration of NetApp Shift Toolkit, NetApp Trident CSI, and Red Hat’s migration toolkit for virtualization (MTV) come in.
Available since v2.9.4, Shift Toolkit based storage offloading for migration has already supported many successful customer migrations. In fact, together we helped a customer reduce its migration timeline for a 40TB VM from 40 hours to 30 minutes. Building on that success, the new native integration enhances the experience by bringing end-to-end migration management into the MTV console, reducing operational overhead and creating a more cohesive workflow.
Today, we're excited to announce the support of NetApp Shift Toolkit with Red Hat MTV, enabling organizations to accelerate VM migrations from their current virtualization environments to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with a simplified, storage-aware, and highly automated workflow. Built on proven ONTAP technology and tightly integrated with Trident CSI and Red Hat MTV workflows, this solution helps customers move faster while taking full advantage of their existing NetApp storage investments.
What makes this integration particularly compelling is that migrations can be initiated directly from the Red Hat MTV console, while seamlessly leveraging Shift Toolkit for fast disk conversions. By leveraging NetApp ONTAP FlexClone technology, the solution creates space-efficient storage clones rather than full replicated copies. This eliminates the need for additional storage capacity for migration staging, addressing a key challenge in large-scale virtualization migrations while reducing cost and operational complexity. By combining ONTAP’s storage efficiencies with NetApp Shift Toolkit’s intelligent conversion capabilities, organizations can reduce migration overhead, minimize downtime, and accelerate their move to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with lower cost and complexity.
Why This Matters
For many organizations, the migration itself isn't the biggest challenge, it's the time spent copying the data, coordinating storage, and managing complex operational workflows.
Traditional migration approaches often rely on large-scale data copies, manual intervention, and storage reconfiguration. The result is longer migration windows and increased operational overhead.
With this new integration:
- Red Hat MTV orchestrates migration planning, execution and VM provisioning.
- NetApp Trident CSI handles intelligent storage provisioning.
- NetApp Shift Toolkit performs rapid disk conversion and storage aware migration operations.
Together, this integration creates an end-to-end migration experience designed to reduce complexity, streamline execution, and significantly accelerate the journey to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization
How the Architecture Works
The integration introduces an elegant workflow between Red Hat MTV, NetApp Trident and the NetApp Shift Toolkit.
When a migration plan is initiated:
- MTV creates and manages the migration workflow.
- Persistent volume claims (PVC) requests are generated as part of the migration process.
- NetApp Trident CSI receives these requests and evaluates migration specific annotations and labels.
- Eligible requests are handled through the NetApp Shift Toolkit Listener.
- The NetApp Shift Toolkit performs the required disk conversion operations and Red Hat MTV brings up the workload VMs online in Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.
The result is a highly automated migration pipeline that converts TBs of disk data, large number of VMs in parallel, all with ONTAP intelligence.
Built for Enterprise-Scale Migrations
The solution has been designed specifically for organizations migrating business critical VM workloads into Red Hat OpenShift environments.
Prerequisites
Before deployment, ensure the following software components are installed and operational:
- NetApp Trident CSI 26.06 or later
- Red Hat MTV 2.12 or later
- Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization 4.20 or later
Storage Class created and labeled specifically for Shift Toolkit usage
Deployment Overview
Getting started is straightforward and follows a simple sequence of steps. Download the latest version of the Shift installer from NetApp Support Site Toolchest. The Shift installer package contains everything required to deploy the Shift operator and install Shift. Extract the package and set up a dedicated namespace for the Shift operator and create the credentials needed for secure API access.
- Create the Shift Namespace
Deploy a dedicated namespace for Shift Toolkit services.
-
oc create namespace shift
- Configure Shift Credentials
Create the shift-credentials secret that will be consumed by both the NetApp Shift Toolkit service and the Shift Toolkit Listener.
-
oc create secret generic shift-credentials -n shift --from-literal=username=admin --from-literal=password='<password>'
- Enable Secure Communication
Deploy TLS certificates and the required CA bundle to establish secure communication between services.
-
oc create configmap shift-toolkit-service-server-crt -n shift --from-file=server.cert=server.cer
oc create configmap shift-toolkit-service-server-key -n shift --from-file=server.key=server.key
This configuration allows the listener to validate the NetApp Shift Toolkit service certificate and maintain secure service to service communication.
- Provision Persistent Storage
Create the persistent volumes required for Shift database storage and operational log storage
-
oc apply -f deploy/filedb-pvc.yaml
oc apply -f deploy/logs-pvc.yaml
These volumes should utilize an appropriate storage class.
- Deploy the bundle
Apply the deployment bundle:
-
oc apply -f deploy/bundle.yaml
The deployment bundle installs:
- Shift Toolkit service
- Shift Toolkit Listener
All within the dedicated Shift namespace.
Designed for Connected and Disconnected Environments
Many enterprise Red Hat OpenShift deployments operate in restricted or air-gapped environments where internet connectivity isn't available.
The NetApp Shift Toolkit deployment supports these scenarios through a fully disconnected installation model.
Administrators can:
- Import container images into the Red Hat OpenShift internal registry
- Use skopeo to load images from the tar files
- Update deployment manifests to reference the internal registry
- Deploy the entire solution without requiring access to external image repositories
Key Benefits
The combination of NetApp Shift Toolkit, NetApp Trident, and Red Hat MTV delivers tangible advantages for modernization initiatives:
- Faster migration execution
- Reduced migration downtime
- Automated storage provisioning through Trident CSI
- Secure TLS enabled service communication
- Support for disconnected OpenShift deployments
- Simplified, policy driven migration workflows
- Better utilization of existing NetApp ONTAP infrastructure
- Scalable migration operations from any storage via svmotion
Getting Started
Whether you're evaluating Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization or already planning a large-scale migration from your current hypervisor, this integration provides a powerful framework for moving workloads quickly and efficiently.
For complete deployment guidance, operational requirements, security configuration details, and detailed installation procedures, see Deploy NetApp Shift Toolkit Operator
With Red Hat MTV orchestrating the migration, NetApp Trident intelligently provisioning storage, and NetApp Shift Toolkit accelerating VM conversion and movement, organizations can confidently modernize their virtualization platforms while minimizing disruption and maximizing the value of their NetApp infrastructure.