Creating custom vmdk and boot without LVM setup

Hello Team,

I am new to RHEL and we are in the process of migrating one of our Linux based OS to RHEL 8 based, Our requirement is we will be bundling the whole OS along with few of our product rpms and create a .ova which can be uploaded into ESX server.

Basically I have content on my root partition. I need to encrypt without erasing the root volume. Kindly guide me how to do this.

Regards,
Gobi S.