---
title: "Declarative clusters: GitOps deployment of hosted control planes on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization"
description: "Hosted control planes for Red Hat OpenShift, based on the HyperShift project, decouple the cluster control plane from worker nodes by running control-plane components as pods inside a central management cluster. On bare-metal infrastructure, OpenShift Virtualization provisions worker nodes as virtual machines, enabling live migration and reducing hardware requirements. The article presents a declarative GitOps workflow using Helm templates and an Argo CD ApplicationSet that dynamically generates deployments from tenant-specific YAML configuration files in Git. Prerequisites include a bare-metal management cluster with OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, and OpenShift GitOps, plus networking configured with NMState, Multus CNI, and MetalLB. The approach achieves a “Cluster-as-a-Service” model where provisioning a production-grade cluster requires only a Git push."
---

# Declarative clusters: GitOps deployment of hosted control planes on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

[Red Hat](https://yomu.fyi/company/red-hat) · Serena Flocco · Oct 6, 2026

**Type:** Tutorial

## Summary

Hosted control planes for Red Hat OpenShift, based on the HyperShift project, decouple the cluster control plane from worker nodes by running control-plane components as pods inside a central management cluster. On bare-metal infrastructure, OpenShift Virtualization provisions worker nodes as virtual machines, enabling live migration and reducing hardware requirements. The article presents a declarative GitOps workflow using Helm templates and an Argo CD ApplicationSet that dynamically generates deployments from tenant-specific YAML configuration files in Git. Prerequisites include a bare-metal management cluster with OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, and OpenShift GitOps, plus networking configured with NMState, Multus CNI, and MetalLB. The approach achieves a “Cluster-as-a-Service” model where provisioning a production-grade cluster requires only a Git push.

## Context

Enterprise data centers running bare-metal infrastructure face hardware underutilization when each new Red Hat OpenShift cluster requires at least three physical nodes for its control plane. Traditional provisioning multiplies this footprint across environments. Hosted control planes, based on the HyperShift project, decouple the control plane from worker nodes by running control-plane components as pods inside a central management cluster, reducing infrastructure costs and enabling fast cluster provisioning. This article presents a declarative, production-ready GitOps workflow that combines hosted control planes with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to run worker nodes as virtual machines, scaling cluster deployment on bare metal.

## Approach / What changed

The solution involves a three-layer GitOps workflow using Helm templates and an Argo CD ApplicationSet on a bare-metal management cluster. Worker node configurations are stored as simple YAML files in a clusters/ directory, while immutable infrastructure code resides in a helm/ directory. When a new configuration file is pushed to Git, the ApplicationSet dynamically generates the Helm deployment, which creates the hosted control plane pods, worker node VMs, and registers the new cluster with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management. The management cluster runs OpenShift Virtualization, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management with its MultiClusterEngine Operator, and OpenShift GitOps.

## Takeaways

- Hosted control planes run control-plane components as pods in a central management cluster, eliminating the need for three dedicated physical nodes per cluster on bare-metal infrastructure.
- Worker nodes are provisioned as virtual machines via OpenShift Virtualization, which requires a ReadWriteMany (RWX) storage backend like Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation to support live migration between physical hosts.
- An Argo CD ApplicationSet combined with Helm allows automated cluster provisioning from Git: a tenant-specific YAML file in the clusters/ directory triggers dynamic deployment generation without manual intervention.

**Tags:** [Bare Metal](https://yomu.fyi/topic/bare-metal), [GitOps](https://yomu.fyi/topic/gitops), [Kubernetes](https://yomu.fyi/topic/kubernetes), [Red Hat OpenShift](https://yomu.fyi/topic/red-hat-openshift), [Virtualization](https://yomu.fyi/topic/virtualization)

- Source: [Red Hat](https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2026/10/06/declarative-clusters-gitops-deployment-hosted-control-planes-red-hat-openshift)
- Source URL: https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2026/10/06/declarative-clusters-gitops-deployment-hosted-control-planes-red-hat-openshift
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-10-06T15:00:11.292Z

[Read original post](https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2026/10/06/declarative-clusters-gitops-deployment-hosted-control-planes-red-hat-openshift)