What is KubeVirt? How does it migrate VMware workloads to Kubernetes?

The KubeVirt open-source project was started by Linux vendor Red Hat in 2016. The project joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is the home of Kubernetes, in 2019. As part of the CNCF, KubeVirt benefits from a broad ecosystem of vendors that contribute to the project. According to the CNCF contributors include: Amadeus, Apple, CloudFlare, IBM, NEC, Nvidia, SAP and SUSE.

The project is maintained on GitHub, with the primary repository GitHub – kubevirt/kubevirt. Commercial support and tooling are available from multiple vendors.

The evolution of KubeVirt

Since the project got started in 2017, KubeVirt has grown in a number of ways.

“KubeVirt started with the goal of bringing VMs into Kubernetes, enabling the automation and scaling concepts of Kubernetes for virtual machines, providing a faster development lifecycle regardless of what technology the application was deployed to,” Sachin Mullick, senior manager, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, told Network World. “This vision continues, but we have seen it expand to address infrastructure requirements with rapid innovations, not just in KubeVirt but also adjacent ecosystem projects.”

Mullick noted that projects like medik8s, NMstate and OVN-Kubernetes have provided high availability and advanced networking features for virtual machines. Features like hot-plug and resource overcommit were delivered over the last couple of years, coming out of the strong focus on ensuring virtualization admins have a feature rich experience. 

“The rapid growth of Kubernetes and its ecosystem will bring additional features like confidential computing to virtualization,” he said.