Platform9 Unveils First Managed KubeVirt Solution to Unify Virtual Machines and Kubernetes Stacks

Platform9 announced the launch of Platform9 Managed KubeVirt. Platform9 Managed KubeVirt (PMK) is the industry’s first managed KubeVirt solution to offer a unified platform to run virtual machines (VMs) alongside containers.

“Traditional virtualization solutions are expensive and managing a virtualization stack in addition to Kubernetes is complex and error-prone,” said Madhura Maskasky, VP of Product at Platform9. “With Platform9 Managed KubeVirt, developers get the best of both worlds without having to port all of your applications to containers or manage two entirely separate stacks. And, as a 100% open-source solution there is no vendor lock-in.”

KubeVirt VMs are created in Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK) clusters and can be managed using the same centralized SaaS management plane. Platform9 Managed KubeVirt enables users to manage VMs by Kubernetes alongside containers to overcome the operational silos that exist today and standardize on Kubernetes as the control plane. The solution is entirely supported and managed by Platform9’s expert team through active monitoring of clients’ Kubernetes clusters 24/7.

Platform9 Managed KubeVirt comes with out-of-the-box capabilities such as:

• Cloud-managed upgrades
• Automated monitoring for VMs using built-in per cluster Prometheus instance
• SR-IOV and OVS-DPDK support for performance-sensitive applications
• User-friendly SaaS console for VM operations
• VM management capabilities like: Image management, Preset management, and Snapshot management
• Enterprise-readiness capabilities like: RBAC, multi-tenancy, and resource utilization quotas
• Bare metal performance without paying a penalty for running on top of a hypervisor
• Guaranteed 99.9% uptime SLA through shared visibility, governance, and control across thousands of locations

The result is a cloud-native, self-service, declarative model of operations that will be consistent across all workloads – containerized as well as virtualized. End-users are able to leverage Kubernetes benefits such as declarative interfaces, scalability, and automation for your VMs.

Maskasky continued, “Virtualization platforms are not always a good fit for verticals like edge computing, telco/5G, and machine learning, where application performance matters most. Platform9 Managed KubeVirt makes deploying and managing KubeVirt seamless, allowing end-users to focus on the projects and applications that impact their business.”

Additional features that our large Telco/5G customers use include:

• IPv6 support for all native services and users’ Kubernetes clusters
• API-driven automated IP address management (IPAM) out of the box
• Multiple high-performance networking options: SR-IOV, DPDK, PCI-passthrough, MACvLan, and IPvLAN
• A fully-managed Kubernetes operator to automate the configuration of a host, its physical network, and all necessary Kubernetes components, without the need to access the host
• Advanced pod scheduling and deterministic performance with CPU-pinning, NUMA-aware scheduling, HugePages, Topology Manager, and CPU manager
• A team of Certified Kubernetes Administrators (CKA) with a consistent CSAT rating of 99.9% is available 24×7