How to Migrate RHV/RHEV VMs to Other Hosts?

You might be aware that Red Hat has declared that it will discontinue providing support for Red Hat Virtualization (RHV/RHEV) by 2026. Actually, the product has ceased development and from August 2020, the product is solely receiving updates for maintenance purposes. This decision means that clients have roughly four years to relocate their RHV tasks to another option, in a market that is undergoing significant changes.

What is RHV (Red Hat Virtualization)?

Red Hat Virtualization (formerly Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) is an enterprise open-source virtualization platform based on KVM that allows organizations to create and manage virtual machines (VMs) and containers. It is designed to provide a secure and flexible platform for running traditional and cloud-native applications.

Features

Centralized management: Red Hat Virtualization Manager offers a centralized management system and comes with a graphical interface that is driven by search.

High availability: Supports clustering and live migration, which allows VMs to be moved between hosts without downtime.

Built for enterprises: Supports up to 400 hosts in a single cluster and no specified maximum limit for the total number of hosts that it can support.

Security: Integrates with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to provide enhanced security features, such as SELinux and trusted boot.

Self-service portal: Includes a self-service portal that allows users to create and manage their own VMs and containers.

Integration with other Red Hat products: Integrates with other Red Hat products, such as Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Ansible, to provide a complete infrastructure management solution.

Pros

Cost-effective: An open-source platform, which means there are no licensing fees for the product.

Flexibility: Supports a wide range of operating systems and applications, which makes it a flexible platform for running both traditional and cloud-native workloads.

Scalability: Supports up to 400 hosts with a maximum workload of 1 VM per GB, making it a scalable platform for large organizations.

Security: Integrates with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which provides enhanced security features.

Load balance: Live migrates VMs across clusters to balance load automatically according to policy.

VM migration: Migrates VMs manually or automatically and prioritizes the VMs by Red Hat Virtualization Manager in case of host failure.

Cons

Learning curve: It can be complex to set up and manage, which may require some training for administrators who are new to the platform.

Resource requirements: Requires significant hardware resources to run, which may require additional investment in infrastructure.

Limited vendor support: While Red Hat provides support for Red Hat Virtualization, other vendors may not provide the same level of support for the platform as they would for more widely used virtualization platforms such as VMware or Hyper-V.

How to Migrate RHV to Other Hosts with an Integrated Solution?

Although its end of life is in 2026, organizations with large-scale infrastructure and small-medium businesses using RHEV should consider moving VMs to other platforms in a trickle or big-bang migration fashion.

There are many ways to perform a V2V migration, but data migration risks exist during the process. To mitigate that, you can use a solution to backup all data on RHV before migration and prepare for the data loss.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery helps all RHV 4.x users back up, restore, or even migrate their VMs to other platforms including VMware, Citrix Hypervisor/XenServer, XCP-ng, Oracle OLVM, oVirt, Sangfor HCI, OpenStack, ZStack, Huawei FusionCompute, and H3C CAS/UIS.

RHV admins can simply restore source backups to the target virtualization across 10+ virtualizations for seamless and secure V2V migration.

Preparation

1.     Download the 60-day full-featured free trial.

1.     Download the backup plugin for RHV from the login interface and install it.

2.     License your system on the System page.

3.     Add RHV to the virtual platform and authorize it.

4.     Create a backup job for RHEV.

Migration

1.     Go to VM Backup> Restore> Restore and choose a restore point from RHV backups.

2.     Choose a target host to migrate and configure the restored VM such as CPU, RAM, name, virtual network, whether to power on the restored VM or not, and other settings.

3.     Custom recovery strategies like migration mode, multithreaded, SAN/LAN/ImageIO transmission, etc.

4.     Review and submit. The job will run on schedule or right away depending on the mode.

After that, you can see the restored VM in your desired environment, and the data migration finishes.

Wrap up

The extended life phase of RHEV/RHV will be ended by 2026, which prompts users to move RHV VMs to other solutions. This process won’t go so smoothly if the company is ill-prepared. You can count on Vinchin Backup & Recovery, a backup solution but it is far more than that. It provides automatic VM backup, instant disaster recovery, anti-ransomware protection, databases and physical servers protection, and worry-free V2V migration across platforms.