Unleashing the Power of KubeVirt

Many of the existing enterprise applications run in Virtual machines (VMs) and will continue to do so for a long time.  With the recent development in the vendor landscape, so many customers are re-looking at what virtualization technology to utilize. Customers are at a crossroad on how to take advantage of all the new innovations while still providing the enterprise features and functionality that are core to their operations.  We decided to take some of the hard questions that may be in your mind in this lively discussion on the Kubernetes Bytes podcast hosted by Bhavin Shah and Ryan Wallner.

We start with defining the upstream project KubeVirt and whether it can be an alternative to a traditional enterprise virtualization environment. We also address the question of what advantages you get by looking at a more modern management paradigm for your virtualization platform. 

Virtualization is more than the hypervisor. It’s important to understand what’s the same, and what is really different. One of the most fundamental questions for any VM administrator around handling live migration, high availability, and optimizing performance, how is it incorporated in KubeVirt? 

To be useful, VMs need compute, storage and network.  From an architecture perspective, KubeVirt runs on any x86 server vendor. Telegraphing our future, Arm is an active contributor in the KubeVirt community.  You can also take advantage of hardware acceleration, KubeVirt has support for vGPU through an operator provided by NVIDIA.  To persist your data, you have the capability to continue to use existing storage vendors. We also dive into how Kubernetes CSI storage abstractions bring cloud-like dynamic storage provisioning for VMs, eliminating waiting for days on an overloaded storage admin. On the network front, we discussed options for utilizing your current networking vendor. You can also leverage software defined networking, like OVN-Kubernetes, and advanced capabilities SR-IOV and DPDK. 

KubeVirt is provided by Red Hat as a feature of OpenShift. OpenShift Virtualization is celebrating its third year anniversary and we get into how other customers are utilizing the technology, some are presenting at Red Hat Summit. You can get started with the KubeVirt Fundamentals learning path on kube by: example.

Being an open source project provides the opportunity for everyone to learn and contribute and we cover some of the avenues to get involved with the upstream KubeVirt community.

We also give a glimpse of exciting innovation around the horizon where KubeVirt combined with another upstream project (HyperShift) can help address multi-cluster use cases much more efficiently and provide the ability to provide on-demand dedicated Kubernetes clusters.

We hope you enjoy ‘Unleashing the Power of KubeVirt’, as much as we enjoyed being on Kubernetes Bytes, available on YouTube or Apple podcast.