Migrating SAS to Red Hat OpenShift generally involves transitioning from a legacy SAS 9 or SAS Grid environment to SAS Viya deployed on a Kubernetes-native infrastructure. This moves your workloads into scalable, AI-ready containers while adopting the Linux operating system architecture
Migration Architecture & Deployment
Deploying SAS on OpenShift relies on a robust containerized infrastructure that separates your workloads from the underlying hardware.
Reference Architecture: SAS, HPE, and Red Hat offer defined "t-shirt sizes" for sizing your OpenShift worker nodes to ensure sufficient memory and CPU.
Storage Offload: For fast virtual machine (VM) data migration, tools like the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization and OpenShift Virtualization allow large-scale data transfers with minimal network disruption.
Security Contexts: SAS Viya requires specific, elevated privileges at initialization before dropping back to restricted security constraints during regular runtime
Migration Phases
Transitioning from traditional SAS to a containerized platform on OpenShift follows four distinct phases:
Assessment: Analyze your current SAS programs, data stores (like SAS datasets or shared Windows/NFS drives), and user workloads to identify necessary code refactoring.
Environment Build: Provision your OpenShift cluster and deploy the SAS Viya platform using the SAS Deployment Operator.
Data & Workload Migration: Transfer analytics code, stored processes, and data sources into the OpenShift Container Registry using SAS Mirror Manager.
Testing & Validation: Run parallel operations to validate model performance, compute times, and pipeline accuracy within the new cluster.