PNC’s infrastructure modernization journey with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

PNC’s infrastructure modernization journey with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Moving beyond the legacy hypervisor The bare-metal advantage Managing a fleet, not a cluster A bridge to modernization A lesson in planning 15 reasons to adopt Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization About the author Courtney Grosch More like this Migrate your VMs faster with the migration toolkit for virtualization 2.11 Building the foundation for an AI-driven, sovereign future with Red Hat partners Keep exploring Browse by channel Automation Artificial intelligence Open hybrid cloud Security Edge computing Infrastructure Applications Virtualization Share For Marcus Dobeck, vice president and head of container orchestration at The PNC Financial Services Group, if the challenge of 2025 could be summarized in a single word it would be demand. Like many organizations, PNC was moving from a place where they were used to managing a handful of clusters to a reality where they faced hundreds of new requests. In the past, an 8-week delivery window was acceptable, but as the bank’s digital needs expanded, delivery times needed to shrink. We sat down with Dobeck to discuss why PNC made the decision to move to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and what impact that migration has had. Dobeck compares the shift from their previous hypervisor to Red Hat OpenShift to the transition from a fragmented mobile ecosystem to a streamlined one. “The previous solution was trying to do everything for everyone,” Dobeck explained. That “do it all” complexity created a heavy administrative burden. To move faster, the team needed a platform where virtual machines (VMs) were treated as a critical priority alongside containers. By adopting OpenShift Virtualization, the team moved to a standardized “one VM type” model. Whether the workload is a database or a specialized application, it lives on a single, unified template within the OpenShift ecosystem. According to Dobeck, this standardization allowed them to cut delivery times from, “8 weeks down to 4 with a target of 5 to 10 days in 2026. ” For PNC, the move wasn’t just about software, it was about collapsing the distance between the application and the hardware.