Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization offers a compelling alternative to VMware, providing cost efficiency, consistent operations, and open standards. This unified platform merges kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs) and Kubernetes containers into a single control plane, simplifying infrastructure and operational overhead. By consolidating onto a single platform, enterprises often reduce infrastructure sprawl, license expenses, and administrative complexity. OpenShift Virtualization is hybrid cloud-ready, allowing organizations to span data centers, private clouds, and public clouds - facilitating a measured, step-wise migration away from purely on-premises environments. For highly regulated industries, the ability to keep workloads on-premises under a standardized platform while selectively extending to the public cloud delivers both agility and compliance. With virtualization and containers managed together, organizations can steadily refactor or containerize VMs over time without abrupt migrations, mitigating risk during modernization. CockroachDB offers a distributed SQL database that is highly scalable, resilient, and truly cloud-native, providing strong consistency, resilience & fault tolerance, and cloud-native capabilities. In OpenShift Virtualization environments, CockroachDB's shared-nothing model is fully realized, with each VM pinned to its own worker node, eliminating noisy-neighbor issues commonly found in resource-shared deployments. The deployment of CockroachDB on OpenShift Virtualization provides a forward-looking solution to modernize infrastructure while protecting mission-critical data and workflows.