Introduction

SUSE® Virtual Clusters

SUSE® Virtual Clusters, a key feature of SUSE Rancher Prime, brings together the lightweight power of the open source engine K3k and the enterprise-grade management capabilities of SUSE Virtual Cluster Management.

This solution is designed to deliver the next generation of multi-tenancy in Kubernetes, making it easier for platform teams to manage and for developers to innovate with self-service. With SUSE® Virtual Clusters, you can spin up lightweight Kubernetes control planes on demand using K3s, without the overhead of provisioning and managing full physical clusters.

This makes it possible to:

  • Enable secure and robust multi-tenant workload isolation.

  • Optimize infrastructure costs by sharing worker nodes and platform services across many virtual clusters.

  • Empower developers to self-serve and experiment without impacting others.

  • Give platform teams control with policy, governance, and lifecycle management tools.

SUSE® Virtual Clusters strikes the right balance between autonomy for developers and control for operators, thereby creating a scalable foundation for modern Kubernetes platforms.

Key Components

  • SUSE Virtual Cluster Engine: The open source project powering SUSE Virtual Cluster Engine, K3k, has passed the CNCF Kubernetes conformance tests and is listed in the CNCF Certified Kubernetes® Software Conformance program. Based on K3s, a lightweight CNCF project, K3k ensures interoperability, compatibility and a consistent Kubernetes experience for workloads and tooling.

  • SUSE Virtual Cluster Management: Manage SUSE® Virtual Clusters at scale directly from SUSE Rancher Manager with an enterprise-ready management interface. Features include:

    • Rancher Integration - Benefit from Rancher RBAC and extend it. Create and manage virtual clusters and policies directly from Rancher.

    • CAPI Provider - Cluster API support for lifecycle automation.

    • Terraform Provider (pre-release) - Infrastructure-as-Code workflows to scale and standardize cluster management.

Why SUSE® Virtual Clusters?

With SUSE® Virtual Clusters, organizations can:

  • Deliver true Kubernetes multi-tenancy with two modes, shared and virtual, fitting most production use cases (doc link - how to choose between modes).

  • Reduce cloud and infrastructure spend through shared worker pools and shared services (doc link - shared mode) from the host back to the virtual cluster.

  • Speed up developer workflows with fast, lightweight clusters in a self-service mode (doc link - quickstart UI)

  • Define guardrails (doc link - virtual cluster policy) with policy, governance and lifecycle tooling, enabling seamless collaboration between platform and developers teams.

*Certification details: K3k conformance results are published on the CNCF listing.

Kubernetes® is a registered trademark of The Linux Foundation in the United States and other countries and is used pursuant to a license from The Linux Foundation.