Many organizations are in the same position: VMs are critical to running core business applications, and the surrounding infrastructure (networking, storage, backup, security) has grown more complex over time.

Continuing with manual or fragmented processes creates several challenges:

• Scale and complexity: When you’re managing thousands or even tens of thousands of VMs, manual provisioning, patching, and decommissioning become slow and error-prone.
• Inconsistent configurations: Different teams and environments often apply changes in different ways, which can lead to configuration drift, performance issues, and security gaps.
• Wasted resources and higher costs: Unused or redundant VMs are easy to overlook without a unified view and automated cleanup, which drives up infrastructure and licensing costs.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform helps you reimagine VM management by:

• Automating end-to-end VM lifecycle tasks, from Day 1 provisioning through Day 2 operations and eventual retirement.
• Managing not just VMs, but also the connected multivendor infrastructure—networking, storage, backup, and security.
• Using event-driven automation to respond automatically to conditions like performance thresholds, idle VMs, or security alerts.

One health insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, used automation to replace a costly external VM provisioning service and saved 70,000 work hours over 2 years by automating VM provisioning and running 200,000 Ansible Playbooks. That kind of data point shows how automation can reduce manual effort, improve consistency, and free teams to focus on higher-value work.

Ongoing VM operations—patching, backups, health checks, incident response—quickly become a bottleneck when they’re handled manually. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is designed to automate these recurring tasks across your entire virtual ecosystem, not just the VMs themselves.

Here are some practical ways it helps:

• Inventory and configuration management: Automatically discover and update your inventory of VMs and related infrastructure, and keep systems like a ServiceNow CMDB in sync with real-time data.
• Backup and disaster recovery: Schedule or trigger backups based on predefined conditions, and automate disaster recovery workflows to maintain application and data availability.
• Health checks and monitoring: Run automated health checks to verify that VMs are reachable and performing as expected. Event-driven automation can scale resources or trigger remediation when thresholds are exceeded.
• Patching and upgrades: Apply patches and updates to operating systems, hypervisors, and applications in a consistent, repeatable way, with the option to roll back if needed.
• Security and compliance: Automate updates to security standards, patch known vulnerabilities, and use event-driven workflows to notify teams or isolate suspicious activity.

Underpinning this is a Configuration-as-Code approach: you store desired configurations in a single source of truth (such as GitHub) and use Ansible Playbooks and Rulebooks to enforce them. This reduces configuration drift and makes it easier to maintain compliance across all VMs and supporting infrastructure.

The result is a more predictable, resilient VM environment where IT teams spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on optimization and innovation.

Red Hat’s approach is designed to meet you where you are and let you modernize on your own timeline, rather than forcing a rapid, high-risk migration.

Managing VMs across platforms
Ansible Automation Platform helps you manage VMs consistently whether they run:

• On-premise
• In public clouds (such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud)
• In private clouds or at the network edge

With more than 170 supported Ansible Content Collections for major virtualization, cloud, network, backup, and storage vendors, you can:

• Apply the same automation patterns across hybrid and multicloud environments.
• Scale operations using prebuilt, supported automation content.
• Adopt event-driven automation to dynamically scale resources, resolve issues, and enforce policies.

Migrating and modernizing at your own pace
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization lets you run existing VM workloads alongside containerized applications on a single, modern application platform. This gives you a way to:

• Preserve existing VM investments while gradually introducing cloud-native, container-based architectures.
• Operate consistently across on-premise, cloud, and edge environments.

The migration toolkit for virtualization, integrated with Red Hat OpenShift, helps you:

• Assess which VMs are ready to migrate using detailed reports.
• Plan and execute migrations with limited downtime.
• Automate large-scale migrations by pairing the toolkit with Ansible Automation Platform.

Together, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, the migration toolkit for virtualization, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization, and Ansible Automation Platform provide a structured way to:

• Manage complex Day 2 operations consistently.
• Move from traditional virtualization platforms to modern environments.
• Control costs and risk by spreading modernization efforts over time, instead of doing everything at once.