.png)
The evolution of enterprise infrastructure is being shaped by the convergence of containers and virtual machines (VMs). Developers and DevOps teams are constantly navigating between traditional virtualized systems and modern container-based application environments. Enter KubeVirt, an open-source extension that bridges these two worlds by enabling virtual machine workloads to run natively within Kubernetes clusters.
KubeVirt empowers organizations to consolidate their infrastructure under a unified control plane, allowing for both container-native workloads and legacy virtual machines to coexist. This powerful capability makes KubeVirt a game-changer for enterprises modernizing their systems, particularly those dealing with hybrid or transitional workloads that span across traditional VMs and cloud-native containers.
In this blog, we will take a deep dive into the use cases, advantages, developer benefits, operational insights, and real-world applicability of KubeVirt. We will explore how KubeVirt enables a seamless modernization strategy, reduces infrastructure complexity, and enhances development velocity without sacrificing the operational stability of legacy applications.
One of the most pressing challenges developers face during modernization is the burden of rewriting legacy applications. Many enterprise applications run inside virtual machines because they rely on full operating system capabilities or depend on tools that are tightly coupled with the host OS. Completely refactoring or rearchitecting these applications to be containerized can be expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone.
With KubeVirt, developers no longer have to choose between supporting legacy VMs and moving to Kubernetes. Instead, they can deploy existing VM-based workloads inside Kubernetes clusters, maintaining current application behavior while modernizing supporting services using container-native paradigms. This approach allows for incremental modernization, minimizing disruption and risk.
By integrating VMs into Kubernetes, KubeVirt creates a unified development and operations experience. Developers use the same kubectl command-line tool, YAML manifests, Kubernetes CRDs (Custom Resource Definitions), namespaces, and RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) policies to manage both virtual machine instances (VMIs) and containerized workloads.
This seamless experience significantly reduces the complexity of managing hybrid workloads. Teams no longer need to juggle separate virtualization platforms and orchestrators for different workload types. Kubernetes becomes the single pane of glass for both containers and VMs, streamlining deployment, monitoring, automation, and governance workflows.
KubeVirt empowers developers with full declarative control over virtual machines. Using Kubernetes manifests, developers can define everything from VM resource requests and disks to networking and cloud-init configurations. The VirtualMachine and VirtualMachineInstance (VMI) CRDs enable developers to manage VM lifecycles, create, start, stop, pause, live migrate, snapshot, or delete, using standard Kubernetes techniques.
This declarative infrastructure-as-code (IaC) approach means VM operations can now be automated via GitOps pipelines, CI/CD workflows, and Kubernetes-native tools. Developers no longer need to depend on proprietary VM management consoles or vendor-specific APIs.
Hybrid workloads are becoming the norm for enterprises that must manage both legacy and modern applications. KubeVirt is designed specifically to support these hybrid environments, allowing legacy VM-based applications to coexist with microservices deployed in containers. This capability enables a gradual, controlled migration strategy rather than a risky "lift-and-shift" or "rip-and-replace" approach.
For instance, you can run a traditional monolithic application inside a KubeVirt-managed VM while containerizing adjacent services such as API gateways, authentication services, or data pipelines. Over time, these components can be refactored and migrated, all without moving away from the Kubernetes ecosystem.
A significant barrier to modernization is the need to rewrite legacy applications that are still mission-critical. Applications that rely on older Java versions, Windows binaries, or system-level dependencies often require full operating systems and are not easily containerized.
With KubeVirt, organizations can host these VMs within Kubernetes without altering the application codebase. These VMs can then integrate with container-native services via Kubernetes networking, secrets management, and service discovery. This makes KubeVirt a crucial tool for application modernization teams seeking to phase in microservices gradually while preserving existing business logic.
Developers often require test environments that mirror production down to the OS level. Containers are great for application logic but fall short when testing kernel modules, device drivers, or full OS stack dependencies.
KubeVirt solves this by allowing developers to spin up lightweight virtual machines on demand, complete with full operating system environments. These VM test environments can be defined as code, versioned, and triggered via CI/CD pipelines, enabling consistent and reliable development and testing workflows with true environment parity.
Live migration is a cornerstone of high-availability infrastructure. It enables administrators to move a running virtual machine between physical nodes without application downtime, making it essential for scheduled maintenance, load balancing, or hardware upgrades.
KubeVirt supports live migration natively, giving DevOps teams the flexibility to perform node upgrades or resource scaling operations without interrupting mission-critical workloads. When combined with Kubernetes' built-in capabilities for pod scheduling and node management, KubeVirt brings enterprise-grade VM mobility into a container-native world.
Organizations running shared infrastructure must enforce strict workload isolation to ensure security, compliance, and tenant resource boundaries. KubeVirt leverages Kubernetes namespaces to logically and securely isolate workloads.
Each VM runs in its namespace, and Kubernetes RBAC, Network Policies, and Quotas can be applied just like with pods. This means VMs benefit from the same multi-tenant controls and governance policies that Kubernetes already provides, reducing attack surfaces and improving operational consistency.
KubeVirt enables Kubernetes to orchestrate both VMs and containers, eliminating the need for dedicated virtualization stacks like VMware or OpenStack. This unification reduces complexity in managing development environments, simplifies infrastructure provisioning, and standardizes monitoring, scaling, and service exposure.
By using Kubernetes as a universal control plane, developers can write, deploy, and operate applications, whether containerized or not, under a single system. This dramatically increases agility and development velocity.
Maintaining separate infrastructure for containers and virtual machines often leads to underutilized resources and duplicated tooling. KubeVirt allows for resource consolidation by colocating VMs and containers on the same Kubernetes cluster. This improves resource utilization, reduces total cost of ownership (TCO), and eliminates licensing fees associated with legacy hypervisors.
By using open-source KubeVirt on bare metal or cloud infrastructure, organizations avoid expensive per-VM licensing, vendor lock-in, and redundant hypervisor layers.
VMs managed through KubeVirt can tap into the Kubernetes ecosystem, including integrations with Prometheus (monitoring), Fluentd (logging), Istio (service mesh), and CSI/CNI (storage/networking plugins). This offers feature parity between containers and VMs in terms of observability, security, scalability, and automation.
Developers and SREs can now monitor VMs using the same dashboards and tools they use for container workloads, reducing tooling complexity and improving cross-team collaboration.
With KubeVirt, VM configurations are treated as code and stored in version-controlled repositories. VM deployment, updates, and rollbacks are managed via standard Kubernetes workflows, bringing the same level of repeatability, traceability, and auditability to VMs that DevOps teams expect from containerized apps.
This encourages the adoption of GitOps practices, where VM environments can be rolled out, reverted, or templated based on infrastructure manifests stored in Git.
Security remains a top concern when dealing with multi-tenant infrastructure. With KubeVirt, developers can enforce strict security policies at the namespace level, apply Kubernetes RBAC for access control, leverage network segmentation via policies, and enable auditing and logging for all VM operations.
VM images can also be scanned, signed, and validated, ensuring a secure software supply chain and compliance posture consistent with Kubernetes security practices.
KubeVirt is cloud agnostic and can run on public cloud, private datacenters, or edge devices using distributions like OpenShift or K3s. This flexibility makes it possible to deploy the same VM workload across diverse environments, facilitating portability, compliance, and edge compute use cases.
Whether you're deploying a Kubernetes cluster at the edge, in a regional data center, or on-premise, KubeVirt enables uniform workload portability and lifecycle management.
Traditional virtualization requires distinct management consoles and APIs, often siloed from container orchestration platforms. KubeVirt removes that barrier by bringing VM management into Kubernetes, offering developers a single, consistent experience regardless of workload type.
No more separate hardware, hypervisors, or orchestrators. With KubeVirt, developers manage all infrastructure components, networks, volumes, nodes, VMs, using Kubernetes-native tools.
By avoiding commercial hypervisor platforms and leveraging Kubernetes automation, teams can reduce both operational effort and licensing costs. KubeVirt is open-source, scalable, and tightly integrated into Kubernetes' event-driven architecture.
KubeVirt is the foundation for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Harvester by SUSE, and Platform9's virtualization stack, powering real-world production use cases across finance, telco, gaming, and healthcare industries.
Companies like NVIDIA use KubeVirt for GPU-enabled VMs in edge AI workloads. Telecom operators deploy 5G network functions as hybrid workloads. Enterprises gradually containerize legacy ERP systems using KubeVirt while maintaining operational stability.
KubeVirt delivers a powerful bridge between traditional virtualization and Kubernetes-native development. It unlocks new modernization pathways for developers by integrating virtual machine management into the same control plane used for container workloads. Whether you're building hybrid workloads, extending legacy applications, or looking to consolidate infrastructure, KubeVirt offers a future-proof solution that reduces complexity while preserving flexibility.
It’s not just a compatibility layer, it’s a unified development platform that gives developers full control over application deployment, regardless of whether the app runs in a container or a VM.
.png)
