Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.18, the latest version of the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes. Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 introduces new features and capabilities designed to streamline operations and security across IT environments and deliver greater consistency to all applications, from cloud-native and AI-enabled to virtualized and traditional.
According to the Gartner® press release Top Trends Impacting Infrastructure and Operations for 2025, revirtualization/devirtualization is one of the top trends facing organizations for 2025. As shifts in the virtualization market require organizations to reevaluate their virtualized infrastructure and strategies, for many it is an opportunity to implement technologies that will both deliver on their current IT requirements as well as help them meet the needs of tomorrow. The latest enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift are designed to simplify the management of virtual machines and containers while providing organizations with a common infrastructure to bring their generative AI (gen AI) plans to life.
Enhanced virtualization experience
Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 introduces new virtualization enhancements that improve networking, simplify storage migration, and streamline VM management. These updates reduce operational complexity, enhance flexibility and improve resource efficiency -- making it easier to manage and adapt virtualized environments as needs evolve.
• VM-friendly networking provides support for common VM networking use cases with the general availability of user-defined networks, making it easier for users to get their virtualization platform up and running. Also available with OpenShift on AWS and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, this allows users to have similar networking capabilities for secondary networks on AWS as they do on-premises, allowing for more hybrid cloud flexibility.
• VM storage migration, available as a technology preview, now includes additional enhancements that allow for non-disruptive movement of data between storage devices and storage classes while a VM is running, enabling users to be more agile as storage needs change.
• Tree-view navigation, available as a technology preview, enables users to logically group VMs into folders which allows for a more granular grouping. Additionally, with logical grouping, also available as a technology preview, users have a quicker and easier way to navigate between VMs using a single click.
Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 also enhances user-defined networks with Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which improves segmentation and supports advanced use cases like VM static IP assignment, live migration and stronger multi-tenancy.
Extending choice for greater hybrid cloud innovation
Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 expands support to additional public cloud providers, providing users with increased flexibility for how and where they choose to run their workloads. Red Hat OpenShift now supports bare-metal deployments on Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Additionally, for users looking for virtualization in the public cloud, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is now available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a technology preview.
Simplified operations for security
Red Hat OpenShift 4.18 introduces new security features designed to help drive more resilient operations while decreasing potential risks. Secret store container storage interface (CSI) driver is now generally available and provides users with a vendor-agnostic solution for managing credentials and sensitive information for applications. Workloads on Red Hat OpenShift can access external secrets managers without storing secrets on the cluster, enhancing overall security hygiene and simplifying credential management. This allows for clusters to remain unaware of secrets, thereby further reducing risk. Additionally, Secret Store CSI Driver enhances complementary solutions, such as OpenShift GitOps and OpenShift Pipelines, by enabling them to consume secrets from an external secrets manager in a more secure way.
