Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is built on Red Hat OpenShift, so you manage both containers and virtual machines (VMs) on a single, hardening-ready platform. This lets you apply consistent security controls across all workloads instead of maintaining separate toolsets and policies.

Key ways it helps you strengthen security:

• Platform hardening from the ground up: OpenShift provides a hardened foundation that can be tuned to your organization’s security requirements, so VMs and containers inherit the same baseline protections.
• Compliance at cluster level: The Compliance Operator lets administrators define the required compliance state for a cluster, identify gaps, and get guidance on remediation steps.
• Controlled hardware access: You can restrict GPU and USB pass-through to approved devices, reducing the risk of unauthorized data access or code execution from attached hardware.
• Trusted software supply: By disabling nonessential feature gates and enforcing trusted container registries over TLS, you limit exposure to unverified images and configuration errors.

Taken together, these capabilities help you rethink how you secure hybrid cloud workloads by centralizing and standardizing controls across your environment.

OpenShift Virtualization treats VMs as Kubernetes objects, which means you can manage them with the same governance model you already use for containerized applications.

Practically, this gives you:

• Consistent RBAC and audit policies: You can apply role-based access control (RBAC) and auditing to VMs so that only authorized users can create, modify, or interact with critical workloads, and all changes are logged.
• Tighter operational access: You can restrict executive access, VNC console access, and live migration operations to approved administrators, reducing the risk of unauthorized changes or data exposure.
• Resource isolation: Disabling guest-memory overcommit and shareable disks where they are not needed helps reduce resource contention between tenants and limits the blast radius if a single workload is compromised.
• Consistent error handling: Enforcing consistent error-handling and validation policies for critical workloads helps avoid inconsistent behavior across environments and reduces the risk of silent failures or data corruption.

This approach helps you reimagine VM management as part of a unified Kubernetes-based operating model, instead of a separate virtualization silo.

OpenShift Virtualization extends security controls to both networking and storage, so you can manage them alongside compute in a single plane.

Network security enhancements:

• Unified microsegmentation: Network policies apply at both the container and VM levels, so you can keep a consistent microsegmentation model across all workloads.
• Visibility and detection: Applying consistent network policies, observability, and logging helps you detect suspicious traffic patterns faster and simplifies troubleshooting.
• Traffic isolation: Using VLANs to isolate tenant or application traffic reduces the risk of lateral movement between segments.
• Identity protection on the network: MAC address spoof filtering and multinetwork policies for sensitive workloads help prevent identity spoofing and keep high-value application traffic isolated.
• Controlled secondary networks: You can define clear boundaries for secondary networks such as SR-IOV interfaces and map them to specific workloads or tenants so that traffic bypassing the virtual switch remains controlled and auditable.

Storage security enhancements:

• Centralized storage policies: You can apply the same encryption, access controls, and replication policies across virtualized and containerized workloads, which streamlines compliance and recovery planning.
• Data boundary control: Restricting DataVolume (DV) cloning across namespaces keeps sensitive datasets within approved boundaries and helps avoid unintended propagation of regulated or high-risk information.
• Reduced unintended sharing: Disabling unnecessary shareable disks lowers the chance of unintended data sharing between workloads and reduces the risk of corruption from concurrent writes.
• Predictable failure handling: Validating errorPolicy settings and storage permissions for critical data helps ensure failed storage operations are handled predictably and that only authorized workloads can read or write sensitive volumes.

By bringing these capabilities together, OpenShift Virtualization helps you reshape how you secure network traffic and data across your hybrid cloud, while making it easier for storage, security, and platform teams to collaborate on consistent policies.