Telenet Business consolidates VMs, containers on one platform while keeping data inside Belgium

Running separate infrastructure stacks for virtual machines and containerized workloads creates friction that compounds over time. Different management tools, different operational procedures, different failure modes to diagnose when something goes wrong. Telenet Business, which serves around 10,000 business customers across Belgium, reached a point where its legacy virtualization setup was creating enough of that friction to justify a significant infrastructure overhaul. The company rebuilt on Red Hat OpenShift, consolidating both VMs and containers onto a single platform running on bare metal across two regional Belgian data centers.

The consolidation itself is meaningful, but the sovereignty dimension is what gives this migration its sharper context. All workloads remain inside Telenet Business’s Belgian facilities, with data replicated four times across both sites to maintain high availability without routing anything through public cloud providers outside the country.

For a Belgian service provider with customers in regulated sectors, that residency commitment is not a marketing position. It directly addresses the data governance requirements that determine which contracts a provider can credibly pursue.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes handles the management layer across both data center clusters from a single view. That setup also enables automatic failover, spinning up VMs at the alternate location if one site becomes unavailable, which changes the operational conversation from manual recovery procedures to automated continuity.

Dave Van Ingelghem, Technical Product Manager for Datacenter at Telenet Business, described the requirement plainly: the platform needed to strengthen data protection without sacrificing the ability to modernize. OpenShift addresses both sides of that requirement simultaneously, which is harder to achieve than either side alone.

Stef Schampaert, Country Manager for Belgium and Luxembourg at Red Hat, framed the broader European context, noting that service providers across the continent need the control and transparency of digital sovereignty to remain competitive as enterprise customers pay increasing attention to where their data actually lives.

The platform also provides a foundation for AI workloads at scale, with VMs and containerized applications sharing the same hardware and management layer in a way that extends to running predictive and generative AI models. Red Hat’s recently launched AI Enterprise platform, which covers AI inference, model tuning, and agent deployment across hybrid cloud environments, sits alongside this infrastructure direction as part of the same operational evolution.

For European telcos watching their enterprise customers grow more demanding about data residency and infrastructure control, Telenet Business’s approach offers a concrete example of how those requirements translate into actual architecture decisions.