You can now deploy Windows containers with OpenShift

Customers of Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform will now be able to deploy Windows containers alongside their Linux containers, according to reports.

The move will help companies streamline the management of their multi-cloud infrastructure by making it simpler to manage both Linux and Windows containers from the same platform.

“With Red Hat OpenShift support for Windows containers, organizations no longer need to manage separate IT stacks for their Linux and Windows containers – helping to break down silos and make it easier for enterprises to pursue their cloud-native agenda,” said Ashesh Badani, Red Hat's SVP of cloud platforms to ITProToday.

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Collaboration with Microsoft

OpenShift gets this new capability thanks to the Windows Machine Config Operator (WMCO) that was announced back in October. Developed jointly by both Red Hat and Microsoft, the certified operator allows users to manage Windows containers through the OpenShift console.

“Running Windows workloads on Red Hat OpenShift has been a regular request from numerous customers over the years,” wrote OpenShift engineers while announcing WMCO, adding that “we see there is an enormous opportunity to accelerate customer adoption of Windows Server applications to public cloud via containers.”

It’s reported that with the new capability, OpenShift will support .NET Core applications, .NET Framework applications and other Windows applications.

The new feature will be rolled out to customers in early 2021, and will initially support running Windows containers on OpenShift on bare-metal servers, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud, with support for VMware vSphere in the works.