Jeff Cheng
Technical Product Manager for Hitachi Integrated Systems, Hybrid Cloud and Modern Apps
July 15, 2025
Cross-hypervisor moves – from other virtualization platforms to modern platforms like Red Hat OpenShift – still depend on bulky IP transfers that clog networks, tax CPUs and extend maintenance windows. When every minute of downtime carries a cost, this incompatibility is one of the chief obstacles to rapid, low-risk modernization. Especially for enterprises replatforming production workloads.
VM estate replatforming has been constrained by IP-based data transfers – reliable, but inherently limited – for years. Multi-terabyte and even petabyte-scale VM volumes must be moved with minimal disruption. But transferring them over traditional networks introduces latency, consumes compute resources, and extends migration timelines, often disrupting or heavily impacting business operations and customer experience.
That’s why the latest update to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization’s migration toolkit for virtualization (MTV) 2.9 is such a game changer. With the introduction of direct storage offload data movement, enterprises can now bypass traditional network bottlenecks entirely.
That’s where we enter the picture.
Redefining What’s Possible with Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat
By enabling direct storage offload data movement into Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization’s migration toolkit for virtualization (MTV) 2.9, customers can achieve a 10x acceleration in virtual machine (VM) volume and disk migration for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization – transforming a month’s long migration into as little as three days. For enterprises replatforming to a unified VM-and-container environment, the impact is strategic and immediate.
Hitachi Vantara is the first to have its offload drive reach technology preview in MTV 2.9, marking a strategic shift in how enterprises approach virtualization modernization.
Why Accelerated Replatforming Matters
When going through virtualization replatforming, enterprises aren’t migrating test environments – they’re moving production workloads. So every second of downtime or reduced performance impacts revenue, customer experience and operational continuity.
With Red Hat’s MTV 2.9, that paradigm is substantially altered. By enabling direct storage offload data movement, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization have eliminated the need for data to traverse host networks, switches and IP stacks.
Industry Context: The Rise of Multi-Hypervisor Strategies
The virtualization landscape is evolving rapidly. Enterprises are rethinking their infrastructure strategies in response to:
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is emerging as a highly strategic solution, offering a single control plane for both VMs and containers. However, migrating legacy workloads to this platform – especially at scale – has remained a time-consuming hurdle. But that process is now significantly accelerated with the release of MTV 2.9.
Storage Offload Migration Engineered for Performance
Hitachi Vantara, a long-time, trusted Red Hat ecosystem partner, offers VSP One based integrated systems and solutions tailored for OpenShift containers, virtualization and AI workloads. The goal is to eliminate existing hurdles through continuous innovation.
Led by Chief Researcher Ryosuke Tatsumi at Hitachi Research/Hitachi America, we conducted an exhaustive analysis of storage protocols and virtualization APIs. Then we designed a storage-offloading mechanism that allows Forklift (the upstream version of MTV) to leverage our storage capabilities and then shift disk-copy and format-conversion tasks from the network and compute layers into the storage array. The array internally transforms and migrates the virtual disk into an OpenShift Persistent Volume. Finally, Forklift creates and deploys the Virtual Machine manifest to bring the migrated VM online.
The result: a storage-native migration mechanism that leverages the high-speed, storage offload internal pathways of Hitachi VSP One Block storage systems.
Key benefits of storage offload migration include:
These are not just incremental improvements. It’s a redefinition of what’s possible in enterprise-grade VM migration.
Open Innovation: Contributing to the Community with MTV 2.9
As one of the top 10% contributors to Kubernetes globally, Hitachi believes in advancing the ecosystem beyond our own products.
That’s why the storage offload migration capability has been fully open-sourced and integrated into MTV 2.9, enabling enterprises with external SANs – not just Hitachi solutions – and existing virtualization environments to transition to OpenShift Virtualization with minimal disruption, while continuing to leverage their existing SAN infrastructure.
Looking Ahead: What This Means for Your Organization
As enterprises continue to modernize their infrastructure, the ability to migrate workloads quickly, securely and efficiently will be a competitive differentiator. With MTV 2.9, Hitachi and Red Hat are not just solving a technical problem – they’re enabling strategic transformation.
This introduction of storage offload migration delivers multiple advantages:
Next Steps: I Want My MTV 2.9 (You’ll Want It, too!)
If you’re under the age of 30 or so you may not know the onetime global catchphrase above. But our blog editor insists it was huge and says there’s a movie, a book and a great song to prove it.
Whether it’s familiar or not, you are going to want to look into Red Hat’s MTV 2.9 and direct storage offload data movement with Hitachi Vantara and Red Hat, which redefines the meaning of “fast” in enterprise VM migration. By relocating data movement to the SAN layer, organizations gain the dual advantage of speed and simplicity, reducing both operational friction and infrastructure spend. As virtualization, containerization and cloud strategies converge, the ability to relocate workloads in minutes – not days – becomes mission-critical.
Forward-thinking IT leaders should prepare by:
Organizations looking to get started should evaluate their migration roadmap against this new capability and engage their storage and platform teams to pilot storage offload migration as soon as Red Hat’s MTV 2.9 becomes available. Because, in the race to modern infrastructure, every second counts. And with storage offload migration, you’ll have a lot more of them to work with.
Connect with your Hitachi Vantara representative to find out more or get a personal MTV migration assessment and/or evaluation demonstration of OpenShift Virtualization with Hitachi.
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Jeff Cheng is the Technical Product Manager for Hitachi Integrated Systems, Hybrid Cloud and Modern Apps at Hitachi Vantara.
