Red Hat OpenShift for VMware overview

As of 17 July 2025, new automated installations of Red Hat® OpenShift® for VMware® are no longer available for new or existing deployments of VMware Cloud Foundation for Classic - Automated instances. You can still use or delete your existing Red Hat OpenShift for VMware automated installations until 16 July 2026. The service will no longer be available from 17 July 2026.

The Red Hat® OpenShift® for VMware® service is an Red Hat OpenShift cluster by using an automated deployment of the VMware SDDC (Software Defined Data Center) architecture. The Red Hat OpenShift components are deployed as virtual machines (VMs) or appliances by using VMware NSX® software-defined networking.

The Red Hat OpenShift cluster consists of the following components:

Three primary nodes
Three worker nodes, all running Red Hat® CoreOS
Two VMware NSX® VMs
A Red Hat CoreOS template
A bastion VM running CoreOS

For more information about the architecture, see Red Hat OpenShift architecture.

Technical specifications for Red Hat OpenShift for VMware

The following capacity requirements apply only if your VCF for Classic - Automated instance is using vSAN™ storage. If you are using NFS, a new 2-TB NFS data store, which is dedicated to Red Hat OpenShift, is ordered.

The solution topology has the following specifications:

9 CPUs
120 GB RAM
1,170 GB storage

You must have a Red Hat account and the pull secret key from your account. All Red Hat accounts have an associated pull secret, which you can retrieve by logging in to your Red Hat account. You must purchase Red Hat support entitlements through Red Hat and, if needed, send information for all Red Hat OpenShift support issues to Red Hat.

Selecting the target cluster for installation

During deployment and Day 2 operations, you are prompted for the cluster. You can install the service on the management cluster or any workload cluster.

Bastion details

The bastion VM contains an installation directory with the files and tools that are needed to manage and expand the Red Hat OpenShift cluster.

You can log in to the bastion VM by using SSH and the credentials that are provided on the Red Hat OpenShift for VMware service details page. To run commands as the root user, use the command sudo -i.

In addition, most commands for Red Hat OpenShift management must be run from the installation directory. You can change to the installation directory with the command cd /opt/ocpinstall.

Any commands that require the openshift-install, oc, or kubeadmin tools must reference the files that are located in the installation directory by prefixing the command name with ./. For example, ./oc whoami instead of oc whoami.

The Red Hat OpenShift-related files from the bastion include an SSH key, an installation configuration file, command-line tools, and a kubeconfig file. The exact location of the installation configuration directory on the bastion is shown on the service details page.

SSH key

The SSH key on the bastion is installed on all Red Hat OpenShift cluster VMs, which allows SSH login from the bastion into any cluster VM. The full path to the SSH key is displayed on the service details page. For security purposes, it is highly recommended that you generate a new SSH key and update the cluster VMs with the new key. For more information, see Changing the SSH key on the Red Hat OpenShift bastion VM.

When you log in to a cluster VM from the bastion, you must connect as the core user as shown in the following example:

root@bastion# ssh core@control-plane0

High availability

The Red Hat OpenShift VMs are deployed with DRS rules to ensure that they are on physically separate hosts. If a host must be replaced or redeployed, you must adjust the preconfigured DRS rules.

Red Hat subscriptions

The Red Hat OpenShift cluster is associated with the Red Hat account from the pull secret that was provided during installation. To assign subscriptions or manage the cluster, you can view the cluster in the Red Hat portal under Systems or Clusters.

Assigning Red Hat subscriptions and entitlements to your Red Hat OpenShift cluster

Log in to your Red Hat OpenShift cluster web console.
Click Home > Dashboards. Make a note of the cluster ID that is displayed.
Click Administration > Cluster Settings.
Click OpenShift Cluster Manager under the channel, version, and update information.
- Ensure that the cluster ID that is displayed matches the cluster ID from step 2.
- If the cluster is not attached to a subscription, a message is displayed with a link that you can use to find this cluster in the Red Hat customer portal. Use the link to assign the appropriate subscription and entitlement to the cluster.
If you do not have enough subscriptions and entitlements, contact a Red Hat Sales representative.

For more information, see Red Hat OpenShift subscriptions information and known issues.

Configuring authentication

By default, the Red Hat OpenShift installer creates a kubeadmin user that you can use to log in to the cluster. Create authentication backends or more users, as needed, for security purposes.

For more information about how to configure Red Hat OpenShift authentication, see the Red Hat OpenShift documentation.

Updating your Red Hat OpenShift cluster

For more information about updating Red Hat OpenShift, see the Red Hat OpenShift documentation.