By Simon Sharwood
Publication Date: 2026-04-09 15:51:00
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…