09222026 - Demo Recap - From CSI to Snapshots—Seamless VM Management on Red Hat OpenShift
If you missed our latest Expert Led Demo, Matt Webb and I walked through how teams can manage virtual machines on Red Hat OpenShift while using Everpure FlashArray through CSI.
The goal was not to turn every VMware administrator into a Kubernetes expert overnight. It was to connect the dots: many familiar VM operations still exist, but the platform uses different objects, policies, and automation to get the job done.
What you missed 👇
🗺️ A familiar operating model with new terminology. Worker nodes, StorageClasses, PersistentVolumeClaims, live migration, and VirtualMachine objects map closely to concepts many VMware administrators already know.
⚙️ CSI automates the storage plumbing. A StorageClass defines the storage policy, while the CSI driver provisions volumes, maps them to the right node, and handles the day-to-day attachment work.
🔀 Choose the right storage-consumption model. Teams can use Portworx Enterprise volumes for flexible, software-defined storage services across mixed infrastructure, or FlashArray Direct Access when they want array-level data services and visibility in Purity.
🚀 Keep VM operations simple. In the demo, we showed a live compute migration, created a VM from a template, and used the OpenShift console to work through familiar virtualization tasks.
📸 Use array-based snapshots for fast recovery. With CSI configured, snapshots are FlashArray-based. The demo showed taking a snapshot, deleting data, restoring the VM, and bringing the data back quickly.
🧳 Plan migrations around your environment. Migration Toolkit for Virtualization can support cold migrations, while storage-offload migration can use SCSI XCOPY when source VMware storage and OpenShift storage share the same FlashArray.
The practical takeaway: storage policies and automation remove much of the manual LUN, mapping, rescan, and multipathing work. That gives virtualization and platform teams more time to focus on the workload—not the plumbing behind it.
🎥Catch up on the demo HERE 🎥
💬 What is the biggest question your team has about running VMs on OpenShift: migration, storage policy, snapshots, or day-two operations? Share it in the comments.
