Help Center/ Ubiquitous Cloud Native Service/ User Guide/ UCS Clusters/ On-Premises Clusters/ Managing an On-Premises Cluster/ Hybrid Management of VMs and Containers/ Overview
Updated on 2025-04-27 GMT+08:00
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Overview

The hybrid management of VMs and containers enables them to work together through unified Kubernetes APIs. This management mode simplifies O&M, improves resource utilization, and accelerates application modernization, helping enterprises smoothly transition from traditional architectures to cloud native architectures.

Advantages

  • Unified management: Kubernetes APIs are used to manage the lifecycle of VMs and containers, simplifying O&M and improving management efficiency.
  • Flexible expansion: VM and container resources can be expanded on demand to meet different application load requirements and ensure stable service running.
  • Smooth migration: Existing applications are gradually containerized, and key services are retained on VMs, which reduce migration risks and ensure service continuity.
  • Compatibility: The hybrid management of VMs and containers is compatible with the existing VM architecture, supports the deployment and management of cloud native applications, and enables collaboration between traditional applications and modern applications.

The hybrid management of VMs and containers not only improves the flexibility of resource management and application deployment, but also simplifies the transformation from the traditional architecture to the cloud native architecture, providing a more efficient and reliable IT infrastructure solution for modern enterprises. This section describes how to install KubeVirt to enable VM Runtime in a Huawei Cloud cluster, and how to create, manage, and use VMs in the cluster.

The following uses Ubuntu as an example. You can adjust the operations based on the actual OS.

Prerequisites

  • Container runtime: Your Kubernetes cluster is using containerd or Docker 26 or later.
  • Network environment: The network environment can connect to github.com, quay.io, and kubvirt.io.
  • API server configuration: The --allow-privileged=true parameter has been configured for the Kubernetes API server to allow the creation of KubeVirt's privileged DaemonSets.