Is KubeVirt a replacement for $MYVMMGMTSYSTEM?

Maybe. The primary goal of KubeVirt is to allow running virtual machines on top of Kubernetes. It’s focused on the virtualization bits. General virtualization management systems like i.e. OpenStack or oVirt usually consist of some additional services which take care of i.e. network management, host provisioning, data warehousing, just to name a few. These services are out of scope of KubeVirt. That being said, KubeVirt is intended to be part of a virtualization management system. It can be seen as an VM cluster runtime, and additional components provide additional functionality to provide a nice coherent user-experience.

Is KubeVirt like ClearContainers?

No. ClearContainers are about using VMs to isolate pods or containers on the container runtime level. KubeVirt on the other hand is about allowing to manage virtual machines on a cluster level.

But beyond that it’s also how virtual machines are exposed. ClearContainers hide the fact that a virtual machine is used, but KubeVirt is highly interested in providing an API to configure a virtual machine.

Is KubeVirt like virtlet?

Somewhat. virtlet is a CRI implementation to run virtual machines instead of containers.

The key differences to KubeVirt are:

• It’s a CRI. This implies that the VM runtime is on the host, and that the kubelet is configured to use it. KubeVirt on the other hand can be deployed as a native Kubernetes add-on.
• Pod API. The virtlet is using a Pod API to specify the VM. Certain fields like i.e. volumes are mapped to the corresponding VM functionality. This is problematic, there are many details to VMs which can not be mapped to a Pod counterpart. Eventually annotations can be used to cover those properties. KubeVirt on the other hand exposes a VM specific API, which tries to cover all properties of a VM.

Why Kubernetes and not bringing containers to OpenStack or oVirt ?

We think that Container workloads are the future. Therefore we want to add VM support on top of a container management system instead of building container support into a VM management system.