With KubeVirt, Virtual Machines become first-class citizens in Kubernetes, allowing VMs and containers to be managed through a unified control plane. As organizations evolve their infrastructure, many early adopters face the challenge of upgrading systems without disrupting essential services. To support this, KubeVirt provides powerful mobility capabilities for both compute and storage.

KubeVirt enables non-shared storage live migration through QEMU's block migration feature, which is orchestrated by libvirt and KubeVirt components. The core process involves copying the VM's disk data and memory state to the destination node while the VMI remains running.

Cross-Cluster Live Migration (CCLM) extends this capability across Kubernetes clusters, allowing a running VM to be moved seamlessly between clusters. This enhances flexibility and resilience in multi-cluster environments and is especially useful for load balancing, maintenance operations, and infrastructure consolidation – all without interrupting critical workloads. CCLM requires L2 network connectivity between clusters and compatible CPU architectures.

Storage Live Migration (SLM) allows you to move the VM’s disk data from one storage backend to another while the VM remains running. This is particularly valuable when rebalancing storage usage, retiring legacy systems, or adopting new storage classes – all without disrupting the applications inside the VM. SLM requires at least two compatible nodes.

Both CCLM and SLM work with any storage backend, including those using the ReadWriteOnce access mode.

After the session, you’ll be ready to migrate your running VMs – across clusters and across storage – with confidence, like a seasoned scheduler placing pods exactly where they need to be.