How to keep up with evolving virtual machines

If your virtualisation vendor just changed its licensing terms, you are probably staring at a bigger bill and a shorter runway to decide what comes next. The platform you choose in response will shape how your team operates for years, not just what you pay this quarter.

Two buyers, one underlying requirement

In my conversations with IT leaders across Sub-Saharan Africa, I see two kinds of buyers. The first wants to move off their current platform as fast as possible. Their questions are about migration timelines, business continuity and staying within budget. The second wants to use the move as a chance to modernise. Their questions are about target architecture, and increasingly, about where artificial intelligence (AI) workloads will run.

These buyers look different on the surface, but they are converging on the same requirement: a platform that does not force a choice between running virtual machines (VMs) well and running containers well. In Red Hat’s 2025 State of virtualisation report, 89% of IT leaders said combining virtualisation, containers and automation on one platform speeds up development, and 85% were already running a hybrid cloud model, split between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud. Neither buyer can afford a platform that only does half the job.

What consolidating onto one platform actually solves

This is where the conversation usually gets vague, so let me be specific about the payoff, without getting lost in the plumbing.

A modern, unified architecture allows enterprise teams to run legacy virtual machines alongside containerised applications on the same underlying infrastructure. Instead of maintaining two distinct management stacks, operations teams gain a single control plane for visibility, security, and administration, using unified options like Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation as a practical foundation.

That sounds simple, but it removes a real cost most companies underestimate: running a separate infrastructure stack for VMs and another for containers means two sets of tools, two sets of processes and often two separate teams who rarely talk to each other. Consolidating onto one platform collapses that into a single operation, with one place to see what is running, one place to secure it and one team accountable for it.

It also changes what “migration” means. Instead of one forced cutover from an old hypervisor to a new one, the same platform that runs your VMs today can host your containerised services tomorrow, one workload at a time, on your own schedule, without a second re-platforming project three years down the line.

Why the skills math changes everything

Bringing these platforms together solves a budget and talent challenge just as much as an engineering one. Experienced virtualisation administrators and experienced Kubernetes administrators are both scarce across Sub-Saharan Africa, and both are expensive to hire and retain. Running one platform instead of two is not a convenience. For many IT organisations, it is the difference between one team operating with confidence and two teams stretched thin.

It also changes how you host AI. As more businesses in the region move AI from pilot to production, where a workload runs matters as much as which model it uses, and a single platform means your data science team is not forced to pick infrastructure based on how a vendor happened to package its software.

Why the ecosystem matters as much as the platform

Cost concerns are legitimate. In my conversations with IT leaders though, invoice price is only part of what matters. What determines long term value is ecosystem depth, including certified hardware options, integrations with existing operational tools, and specialised local support.

That ecosystem is a large part of why Red Hat OpenShift moved from being one Kubernetes-based container platform among several a decade ago to the platform many enterprises now build and modernise on. In 2025 alone, the number of VMs running on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation grew by 417%, clusters running VMs grew by 93% and customer accounts running VMs grew by 70%.

Choice, not a mandate

Stop evaluating virtualisation platforms purely as VM hosts. Ask instead whether a platform can run your applications, VMs and containers side by side, wherever you need them to run, on-premises or in the public cloud, without dictating your pace of change.  When evaluating financial impact, prioritise flexible licensing structures that align costs directly with active workload usage rather than pre-packaged capacity assumptions. Options designed for modular expansion, such as Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation Engine, allow organisations to scale infrastructure at their own pace. 

As virtualisation demand across Africa continues to grow, you should not have to make this decision under pressure from a vendor’s licensing calendar. You should be able to choose your platform, and what it lets you build next, on your own terms.