Nutanix to add KubeVirt support to run VMs on K8s at the edge

Arm support is on the agenda, too, because AI is going to run on everything

Exclusive Nutanix plans to support KubeVirt to allow its customers to run both containers and VMs on the edge.

It’s common to run Kubernetes inside virtual machines because it is a workload that – like many others – can benefit from the logical isolation virtualization offers. Nutanix, VMware, and others have their roots in managing virtual machines and therefore happily accommodate Kubernetes and even individual containers running inside VMs that employ a lightweight OS. Such vendors make a virtue of the fact that it’s possible to manage containers with the same tools used to wrangle virtual machines.

VMs inside Kubernetes feel a bit bonkers, because containers are an entirely different type of abstraction. But some K8s users felt the need to run some VMs and wanted to use the same tools to manage both containers and VMs.

The result was KubeVirt, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project that makes it possible to run virtual machines inside Kubernetes, mostly for occasions when it’s not possible to refactor VMs as containerized apps.

Nutanix will embrace KubeVirt for a slightly different reason. The company, this week, revealed a bare metal version of its NKP Kubernetes distribution that it feels will often be used on the edge, where applications are mostly containerized and hardware resources are often modest, making use of a full hybrid cloud stack a little wasteful.

But Nutanix thinks some customers who like the idea of running bare metal Kubernetes on the edge may also have a small number of virtualized applications they want to run there.

“Why not support them?” asked Nutanix executive veep of product management Thomas Cornely in conversation with The Register. However, he ruled out supporting KubeVirt in the datacenter, because Nutanix already has its AHV hypervisor to run VMs.

For years, pundits have considered hypervisors a mature technology.

Nutanix execs The Register met at the company’s .NEXT conference in Chicago this week beg to differ, because they feel AI workloads mean the hypervisor’s ability to schedule work and allocate resources is needed like never before. Nutanix created a special version of AHV for its recently released Agentic AI stack to ensure the tool can work well across CPUs and GPUs.

Cornely told The Register that Nutanix has more work to do, because the company expects AI workloads will soon sprawl across multiple sources of computing power that use different architectures. The EVP said Arm support for AHV is therefore on Nutanix’s roadmap, if only to enable emulation of x86 instructions on Arm. Nutanix thinks it will also need to enhance AHV to take advantage of manycore x86 CPUs that blend efficient and performance cores.

Hypervisor innovation is therefore on the agenda.

Another theme at the conference was that VMs will never go away. Nutanix is clearly helping to bring about that prediction by making it possible for them to run in more places and on more hardware. ®