Solution Pattern: Run your private workloads in Disconnected HCP OpenShift clusters with OpenShift Virtualization

The OpenShift 4 Hosted Control Plane (HCP), often referred to as "HyperShift," is an architectural innovation that allows for the separation of the control plane from the worker nodes in OpenShift clusters. This separation enables the control plane to be hosted independently on a managed infrastructure without the need for dedicated virtual or physical machines, which provides several benefits, especially in terms of scalability, resource efficiency, and management overhead.

This solution pattern presents an architectural solution demonstrating how you can run your private workloads in Disconnected HCP OpenShift clusters using OpenShift Virtualization.

Contributors: Gaurav Midha, Juan Manuel Parrilla Madrid


Solutions Patterns help you understand the art of the possible with Red Hat’s portfolio, and not intended to be used as is for production environments. You are welcome use any part of this solution pattern for your own workloads.

1. Use cases

Common use cases that can be addressed with this architecture are:

  • Organizations want to run their private workloads using OpenShift Virtualization.

  • It takes longer than expected to create a cluster.

  • Platform teams don’t want workload admins/developers to have access to control-planes.

  • There is one large server, but it’s too much to host just one cluster.

  • Organizations need more space for workloads in their cluster.

  • It takes a lot of compute to host control planes.

  • Organizations face CRD conflicts between tenants.

2. The story behind this solution pattern

Organizations are looking for ways to deploy their private workloads using Hosted Control Planes architecture. In addition to managing multiple OpenShift clusters, they are also aiming for optimizing resource utilization and reducing costs associated with control plane management.

In this architectural design, we deep dive into: how Organizations can provision Disconnected Hosted Control Planes using OpenShift Virtualization.

3. The Solution

This solution presents an architectural solution demonstrating how you can provision Disconnected Hosted Control Planes OpenShift clusters using OpenShift Virtualization. We will be first mirroring the required images to the internal registry and then using OpenShift Virtualization we will provision disconnected hosted control plane OpenShift cluster.