William Rizzo, a CNCF Ambassador and Global Field CTO at Mirantis, announced his project, KubeSwift, which provides Kubernetes-native VM orchestration on Cloud Hypervisor.

Here’s the idea behind KubeSwift: “KubeSwift runs virtual machines as Kubernetes workloads. You define a VM with a custom resource; controllers reconcile it into a Pod; inside that Pod, swiftletd launches a hypervisor.” (Cloud Hypervisor, on which this project relies, is a VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) for cloud workloads written in Rust.)

While still being in the pre-1.0 state, KubeSwift already supports disk boot from cloud images and direct kernel boot from OCI artifacts, Multus and OVN-Kubernetes for networking, exposing guest ports as Kubernetes Services, GPU passthrough, disk snapshots, offline and live migrations, managing fleets of identical VMs, swiftctl CLI tool for lifecycle management and operations, and many other features.

▶️ GitHub repo

Language: Go | License: AGPL 3.0 | 18 ⭐️

#news #tools #virtualisation

Talos gets a hypervisor, and Sidero Labs joins Yardi

Big news arrived for Talos Linux, a well-known Open Source operating system designed for Kubernetes. First, this project adds a hypervisor to run virtual machines. Interestingly, their solution is not based on KubeVirt. The authors say that requiring "Kubernetes just to run VMs" is an "unnecessary complexity", so they "brought native hypervisor capabilities into Talos Linux" (based on KVM). It will be Open Source. Talos Hypervisor launch (the alpha release and a public demo) will take place during TalosCon 2026, which will be held on October 15-16 in Amsterdam. Its general availability is expected in December.

Secondly, Sidero Labs, the commercial company behind Talos, joins Yardi. It's a US-based software business focused on the real estate industry, with 10k+ employees across 40+ offices worldwide. As Sidero Labs outlines, it will continue to operate as a standalone company, and Talos Linux will remain fully Open Source under the same license (MPL 2.0).

#news #virtualisation

KubeVM from VMware Tanzu joins CNCF Sandbox

Tanzu, VMware's Kubernetes platform, has a VM Operator project that enables virtual machine management via a Kubernetes-style declarative API. It brought to life another project called KubeVM, which was developed in a separate branch of its repo and implemented “a vendor-neutral Kubernetes API for managing the full lifecycle of virtual machines on any hypervisor, implemented through pluggable providers.”

How is it different from KubeVirt? Here's how the KubeVM authors explain: “KubeVM leaves the VM as a native object of the underlying platform and uses Kubernetes as the API surface, delegating placement, migration, and storage to that platform. The two answer the same question for different starting conditions: Kubernetes as the only infrastructure layer, versus Kubernetes as a front door to an existing one. The relationship is intended to be integration: a KubeVirt provider is on KubeVM's roadmap, so the portable API can run on KubeVirt.”

A month ago, KubeVM applied to joining the CNCF Sandbox. A few days ago, the project was accepted by the CNCF TOC.

#news #cncfprojects #virtualisation

Migrating virtual machines from your older infrastructure to Kubernetes? There's a helpful tool to facilitate this process.

Forklift was created specifically to migrate various virtual machines to KubeVirt. The project originated in Red Hat for its OpenShift Virtualization, but then it became a community effort for wider adoption. What it supports:

- migrating VMs from VMware vSphere, Open Virtual Appliances (OVAs), oVirt, OpenStack, Nutanix, Microsoft Hyper-V, and KubeVirt;
- warm migrations for VMware vSphere and oVirt (using CBT snapshots/incremental backup), hot migrations for KubeVirt (v4.20+);
- migrations to remote clusters;
- custom hooks to perform operations on VMs before and after migration;
- validation rules based on Open Policy Agent (OPA) to check VM migration suitability.

▶️ GitHub repo

Language: Go | License: Apache 2.0 | 198 ⭐️

#tools #virtualisation