A lot of teams we work with are juggling 2 worlds at once: the Red Hat OpenShift projects that keep accelerating, and the previous hypervisor platforms or physical infrastructure that need to be kept to run the traffic management and security policies of the BIG-IP appliances. This gets the job done, but nobody enjoys maintaining 2 sets of infrastructure with 2 different lifecycles. It’s a tax we all pay because there hasn’t been a clean alternative. Now there is. F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE) is officially validated by F5 to support Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and listed in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. With this milestone achievement, F5 provides further validation of customer demand for a hybrid container and virtualization platform. Run BIG-IP where you’re already running the rest of your platform OpenShift Virtualization lets you run virtual machines (VMs) directly on your worker nodes. With the validation in place, BIG-IP VE can now be deployed among them, rather than requiring a separate environment you keep around solely for network appliances. Administrators can enjoy 1 control plane, 1 lifecycle, 1 place to look when something needs patching. No change to your security model or traffic logic This isn’t a cut-down version or a feature-limited build. VE inside OpenShift is the very same BIG-IP. Your existing configs—WAF policies, iRules, routing decisions, all the customizations required for your applications—can be used as is. If you're moving from another hypervisor to OpenShift Virtualization, your existing application customizations for BIG-IP VE can also be used without change. For example, you don't need to alter the interface configuration or request new license keys. (For more details, see this F5 blog post.) This also applies when using BIG-IP in the ingress or egress paths for your microservices in the OpenShift cluster. Given the migration to OpenShift Virtualization doesn’t require changes in the VLAN layer and up, no changes are required even when using the F5 Container Ingress Services (CIS) controller for OpenShift. Supported by F5 A common hesitation with running network appliances inside a Kubernetes platform is the lack of support. This "partner validated" status settles that. F5 has gone through the work to make sure the data-plane wiring and performance behave predictably inside OpenShift and, as always, Red Hat fully supports the hypervisor layer. You’re not venturing into “it probably works” territory—this is a supported, documented deployment path. What this means in practice If you’ve been keeping an old virtualization cluster alive just because BIG-IP was sitting on it, you now have an option to retire that stack. Everything—from your microservices, to your mission-critical virtual machines to the traffic management in front of everything—can sit on OpenShift without losing the capabilities your network and security teams depend on. If you’re evaluating your next step, start with the listing in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. It has the supported versions, the validated configurations, and the deployment guide to get BIG-IP VE running directly inside your OpenShift cluster. Product trial Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine | Product Trial About the author More like this More than meets the eye: Behind the scenes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (Part 4) Enhance workload security with confidential containers on Azure Red Hat OpenShift Machine learning model drift & MLOps pipelines | Technically Speaking Building a foundation for AI models | Technically Speaking Browse by channel Automation The latest on IT automation for tech, teams, and environments Artificial intelligence Updates on the platforms that free customers to run AI workloads anywhere Open hybrid cloud Explore how we build a more flexible future with hybrid cloud Security The latest on how we reduce risks across environments and technologies Edge computing Updates on the platforms that simplify operations at the edge Infrastructure The latest on the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform Applications Inside our solutions to the toughest application challenges Virtualization The future of enterprise virtualization for your workloads on-premise or across clouds