NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has migrated mission-critical IT infrastructure supporting deep space operations to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, the companies announced. The move puts the laboratory’s virtual machine estate and its future containerized workloads on a single, unified application platform.
JPL is responsible for some of the most demanding operational computing in existence — the ground systems that command, monitor and receive data from spacecraft scattered across the solar system. Mission operations software has historically run on fleets of virtual machines, and like many large organizations, JPL faced the question of how to modernize that estate without disrupting systems that cannot tolerate downtime.
The laboratory selected Red Hat OpenShift with its built-in OpenShift Virtualization capability to support what Red Hat describes as a sophisticated, high-performance environment. The platform combines hybrid cloud flexibility with automation, providing a path for managing VM workloads while establishing a consistent foundation for containerized applications as they arrive. In practice, that means JPL can run legacy virtual machines and cloud-native workloads side by side, managed through the same tooling.
According to Red Hat, JPL’s approach makes heavy use of cloud-native tooling such as pipelines for VM creation and management — treating virtual machine provisioning as code rather than manual configuration. That streamlines day-to-day operations and strengthens the foundation for the evolving workload demands that come with space exploration, where new missions can introduce sharply different computing profiles.
The migration extends a relationship that goes back nearly a decade: in 2016, Red Hat deployed OpenStack and Linux at JPL to help the laboratory meet growing computing demand from researchers and scientists. The new engagement reflects how the center of gravity in enterprise infrastructure has shifted since then, from building private clouds to consolidating VMs and containers on Kubernetes-based platforms.
The deal is also a marquee reference for Red Hat in a market contest that has intensified since Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware pushed many large organizations to reevaluate their virtualization strategies. Enterprises weighing alternatives now have a data point operating at interplanetary stakes: if a unified VM-and-container platform can carry deep space mission operations, terrestrial workloads look comparatively forgiving.
