SiriusXM modernizes virtualization without missing a beat

Here is a customer virtualization migration story that might sound impossible: moving live, revenue-critical virtual machines (VMs) off a legacy hypervisor without missing a single broadcast beat. 

The outcome? Faster developer velocity, leaner cost structure, and near-zero downtime driven by a platform approach that brings virtualization and containers under one control plane.

SiriusXM, like many enterprises, operated separate platforms for VMs and containers. Running one environment for VMs and another for containers meant double the tools, double the patch windows, and chronic budget creep whenever license terms shifted. SiriusXM wanted a single, future-proof control plane that could handle today’s VMs and tomorrow’s cloud-native workloads, whether it’s on-premise, at the edge or in any public cloud.

A platform built for change

In collaboration with Red Hat and Portworx by Pure Storage, SiriusXM was able to create a single application stack that can run across hybrid cloud environments to support both VMs and containers without sacrificing core requirements around performance, disaster recovery and automation.

The solution included:

• Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to bring new and existing VMs onto OpenShift, enabling customers, like SiriusXM, to have a single solution to manage VMs and containers.
• Portworx Enterprise to provide a single storage and data management platform that allows customers, like SiriusXM, to deliver persistent storage more consistently and the necessary Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 operations to scale VMs and containers on OpenShift.

During an interview at Red Hat Summit, Nate Mason, Director of Platform Operations, SiriusXM put it like this:

Migration in motion

SiriusXM approached the transition with precision. Initial testing took place in dev and QA clusters. Then, during controlled maintenance windows, hundreds of production VMs were live-migrated without disruption.

OpenShift provided workload continuity, while Portworx simplified operations through automated capacity management that resized available storage based on workload size and proactive telemetry to act on any workloads running sub-optimally.

The result: uninterrupted service and a transparent transition. Listeners never noticed a thing.

Early benefits included:

• Operational efficiency through platform consolidation.
• Faster time-to-value, with developers spinning up environments in minutes.
• Cloud optionality, with the same declarative config portable across on-prem, edge, or public cloud.

Looking ahead

With most of the heavy lifting behind them, SiriusXM is now focused on:

• Simplifying storage and application development workflows.
• Scaling GitOps pipelines to enable true infrastructure-as-code.
• Scaling a unified platform that combines the VMs of today with the new container-first workloads being built for the future.

Fueling modern virtualization through collaboration 

Red Hat and Pure Storage continue to build upon our continued collaboration to accelerate  virtualization journeys and cloud-native innovation for organizations globally.  We are excited to share that Red Hat has just been recognized by Pure Storage as the Modern Virtualization Innovator at the 2025 Pure Storage annual Pure//Partner Forum in Las Vegas. This award is presented to the partner that has demonstrated true leadership and innovation in helping customers modernize their virtual environments. This acknowledgment is only possible due to clients like SiriusXM, who have placed their trust in us during their transformation.

You can learn more about the SiriusXM modernization journey in the full interview from Red Hat Summit where Red Hat and Portworx are joined by Nate Mason from SiriusXM on theCUBE.

Learn more about Red Hat and Portworx on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog.