Accelerating VM migration to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization: Hitachi storage offload delivers faster data movement

If you're modernizing your virtualization infrastructure, you've probably discovered that migrating thousands of virtual machines (VMs) takes far longer than anyone anticipated.

For IT leaders who haven't overseen a VM migration in a decade or more, this long timeline often comes as a surprise. What many assumed would take a few weeks can stretch into months or even years.

This extended migration window creates compounding challenges. Organizations find themselves maintaining duplicate infrastructure: 2 sets of hardware, 2 license agreements, and 2 operations teams. The costs add up quickly. VM migrations carry operational risks, as well: the downtime required to move workloads from the legacy platform to the new environment directly impacts business operations.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization: Migrate once, modernize at your own pace

OpenShift Virtualization provides a path forward for organizations looking to move beyond traditional virtualization platforms. Rather than simply replacing one hypervisor with another, OpenShift Virtualization enables you to run and manage VMs on a modern, hybrid cloud-ready platform alongside containers and serverless workloads. A single migration provides a modern foundation, giving you the flexibility to adopt containers, automation, and AI capabilities on your own timeline.

But for many organizations, the migration itself has been the barrier. Moving production workloads at scale requires careful planning, and the time required for data migration has slowed many modernization initiatives.

To address one of the most time-consuming aspects of the journey, Hitachi Vantara has developed a storage offload capability that dramatically accelerates VM migrations to OpenShift Virtualization, helping organizations reach their target platform faster.

The data migration bottleneck

When Hitachi America investigated what was consuming the majority of time during VM migrations, they found a clear culprit: the data migration process. Traditional migration approaches rely on host-based network transfers to move VM data between platforms. This method works, but it doesn't scale efficiently when you're moving petabytes of data across thousands of workloads.

Hitachi’s storage offload capability with VSP One arrays changes how data moves during migration. Rather than transferring VM data through host-based network connections, storage offload uses the high-performance data movement capabilities built into enterprise storage arrays. The migration process shifts to the storage layer itself, where purpose-built hardware can move data far more efficiently.

Ryosuke Tatsumi, Chief Researcher at Hitachi America and the inventor of the storage offload technology, explains, "The storage offload feature is able to offload the data migration process into the storage array instead of using host-based network transfer."

Faster migration: From months to days

The performance improvement is substantial. According to Tatsumi, storage offload delivers migration speeds approximately 10 times faster than traditional host-based approaches. "When a customer takes 60 days or 70 days to complete the migration, this solution can reduce it to about a week," Tatsumi explains.

For organizations facing tight migration timelines, whether driven by licensing changes, contract renewals, or strategic modernization goals, this acceleration changes the calculus entirely. Shorter migration windows mean less time paying for duplicate infrastructure, reduced operational risk exposure, and faster time to value on OpenShift Virtualization.

Tatsumi emphasizes the practical impact: "Shorter migration time makes real value for customers. The customer takes less risk and also less cost. Smooth migration brings the customer to their new modernization platform, and they have the true container-native platform shortly."

How storage offload works

At a technical level, the storage offload capability integrates directly with the migration toolkit for virtualization (MTV), Red Hat's built-in tooling for migrating VMs to OpenShift Virtualization.

The existing VM migration process involves several phases: switching over the VM, migrating configuration data to the target platform, and performing the actual data migration. Storage offload intervenes at the data migration phase, invoking vendor-specific API calls to the target storage device. The storage array's native disk copy capabilities then handle the heavy lifting, converting VM data from the source format to raw device volumes and transferring it at storage-layer speeds rather than network-layer speeds.

This integration is now fully built into MTV and the upstream Forklift open source project. Tatsumi explains, "When customers install the latest version of MTV, they can use the storage offload feature as well."

Currently, Hitachi VSP One block storage appliances support the storage offload feature, with VSP One SDS support on the roadmap.

Enterprise DR capabilities for OpenShift Virtualization

Faster migration addresses the immediate challenge of getting workloads onto OpenShift Virtualization, but Hitachi Vantara has extended their VSP One storage capabilities to support ongoing operations, as well. As Tatsumi puts it: "Migration acceleration is just a one-moment solution. After the migration, customers need disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) capability."

To meet this need, Hitachi offers 3 complementary solutions. Metro Storage Cluster provides active-active storage across metropolitan distances (e.g., New York to New Jersey), enabling continuous business operations and live VM migration across sites. Metro DR offers synchronous replication for organizations that prefer independent, separate clusters rather than a single stretched deployment. Regional DR extends protection to geographically distributed datacenters through automated, asynchronous replication.

"This offering brings the same level of resiliency and high availability as customers experienced in their VMware environment," Tatsumi adds. "And now they are optimized for [Red Hat] OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization."

Underpinning these capabilities is the DR operator, which provides declarative, GitOps-based DR orchestration. This allows organizations to manage VM and volume DR at enterprise scale using the same Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approaches they apply to the rest of their Red Hat OpenShift environment.

Open source by design

Notably, Hitachi chose to use open source technologies to create their storage offload capability. The technology behind storage offload is patented, and Tatsumi received Hitachi's internal Top Strategic Patent Award for the innovation. But Hitachi made a deliberate decision to contribute it to the open source community.

"We knew that customers need the migration accelerator today, not in the future. To accelerate the development and delivery, collaboration with the Red Hat engineering team and open source communities is essential," explains Tatsumi.

This pragmatic approach reflects how quickly organizations need to act on their modernization initiatives. By working within the open source model, Hitachi and Red Hat have been able to bring this capability to market faster and make it available directly within MTV.

Getting started

Whether you're in the early stages of planning your virtualization platform modernization or actively working through a migration, the combination of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and Hitachi storage offload offers a faster, lower-risk path forward. For organizations with Hitachi storage, the capability is accessible through familiar MTV tooling, with performance benefits transparently managed at the storage layer.

To learn more about how storage offload can accelerate your migration, explore the resources below.

Learn more:

• Achieve faster migrations with Hitachi Vantara and OpenShift Virtualization
• Replatform Faster: OpenShift + VSP One Storage Offload (Hitachi Vantara)
• Accelerate virtual machine migrations with the migration toolkit for virtualization 2.10 (Red Hat)