Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV / Forklift)
Red Hat
Included
Warm - seeded online, short cutover window
Agentless
Enterprise estates
Workload V2V
What it is good at
Plan-and-wave migration into OpenShift Virtualization, warm migration with CBT from vSphere, automatic virt-v2v driver conversion, all declarative via CRDs.
Where it falls down
Target must be OpenShift/KubeVirt. Storage class mapping and guest boot mode (BIOS vs UEFI) need care.
Capabilities
- Changed-block tracking / incremental sync
- Wave / batch orchestration
- Agentless operation
- Automatic driver / guest tools injection
- Network and IP mapping
- API / CLI automation
Cost and licensing
- Cost category
- Included — No extra charge if you already hold the platform licence.
- Indicative price
- Included with OpenShift Virtualization; upstream Forklift is free
- Licence model
- Shipped as a supported Operator with the OpenShift Virtualization Engine / OpenShift subscription. The upstream Forklift project is Apache-licensed and free.
- How to license it
- Buy OpenShift Virtualization Engine (per-core subscription, sold in core pairs) from Red Hat or a partner, then install the MTV Operator from OperatorHub. For labs, run upstream Forklift on OKD at no cost.
- Lifecycle
- Current
- Vendor page
- https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/virtualization
Pricing and licensing last reviewed 2026-09-18. Indicative only - confirm with the vendor.
Supported sources
- VMware vSphere / ESXi (vCenter)
- Red Hat Virtualization / oVirt (legacy)
- OpenStack (Nova / KVM)
- Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt)
- Plain KVM / libvirt (RHEL, Ubuntu, SUSE)
Supported targets
- Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt)
- Upstream KubeVirt / SUSE Harvester