Red Hat Inc. today introduced enhanced and new features for its OpenShift version of the Kubernetes orchestrator for software containers, with a particular focus on handling diverse workloads.

Red Hat OpenShift 4.16 is intended to provide consistent management of disparate workloads ranging from transaction-intensive uses to artificial intelligence model training and inferencing.

The new version simplifies environments in which virtual machines must exist side-by-side with containerized applications through features such as metro disaster recovery using storage deployed on OpenShift Data Foundation and Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.

New hot-add central processing unit support enables users to add additional virtual CPU resources to running VMs declaratively for improved memory density with safe memory overcommit. That’s a technique used in virtualized environments to allocate more memory to VMs or processes than is physically available on the host system. A new CPU “hotplug” feature that allows CPUs to be added or removed from a running system without needing to power down or reboot the system.

Multicluster virtualization monitoring with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management enables users to view all VMs across multiple Red Hat OpenShift clusters and collect and more quickly build VM reports, Red Hat said.

OpenShift 4.16 also introduces a “shift left” approach with image-based updates for single-node OpenShift environments. IBUs update software or operating systems by replacing the entire system or application image with a new version rather than applying individual patches or updates to existing files.

Single-node OpenShift users can now shift a large portion of the update process to a staged environment to reduce the time spent updating the production site. Updates can also be rolled back to the pre-update state.

The OpenShift-based Appliance Builder is now available as a technology preview to Red Hat partners who want to build customized appliances with self-contained Red Hat OpenShift instances. Appliance Builder is a container-based utility that builds a disk image with an included agent-based installer for installing multiple OpenShift clusters.

The company also said its Advanced Cluster Security Cloud Service is now generally available. That is a fully managed Kubernetes-native security cloud service that supports both OpenShift and non-Red Hat Kubernetes platforms such as Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Elastic Kubernetes Service, Google LLC’s Kubernetes Engine and Microsoft Corpl’s Azure Kubernetes Service.

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