By Sloane Kali Faye
Publication Date: 2026-11-13 00:31:00
KubeVirt’s graduation from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) marks a turning point in a debate that once pitted containers against virtual machines. A decade on, Kubernetes is becoming one platform for legacy VMs, cloud-native apps and AI.
Enterprises still run much of their IT on VMs, even as AI pushes them toward new infrastructure. Red Hat Inc. is betting they won’t have to choose, with OpenShift 5 managing containers, VMs and AI workloads in one environment. Running two separate systems was never the goal, according to Fabian Deutsch (pictured), director of engineering for OpenShift Virtualization and Modernization and a KubeVirt maintainer at Red Hat.
“But you’ve also got VMs, right, where you’re running applications in the old way that we did for decades before. And do you really want to maintain these two systems?” Deutsch said. “So our vision was, how can we unite those worlds to eventually make it easier to have one paradigm to run both, all these compute workloads on one platform.”
Deutsch spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Rebecca Knight at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed KubeVirt’s graduation, running VMs and containers on one Kubernetes platform, AI’s influence on virtualization and what comes next for the project. (* Disclosure below.)
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