Project post from the Kubevirt Community
The KubeVirt Community is proud to announce the release of v1.4. This release aligns with Kubernetes v1.31 and is the sixth KubeVirt release to follow the Kubernetes release cadence.
What’s 1/3 of one thousand? Because that’s how many people have contributed in some way to this release, with 90 of those 333 people contributing commits to our repos.
You can read the full release notes in our user-guide, but we have included some highlights in this blog.
For those of you at KubeCon this week, be sure to check out our maintainer talk where our project maintainers will be going into these and other recent enhancements in KubeVirt.
Feature GA
This release marks the graduation of a number of features to GA; deprecating the feature gate and now enabled by default:
- Network hotplug: Add network interfaces to, and remove them from, running virtual machines.
- Common Instance types: Simplify virtual machine creation with a predefined set of resource, performance, and runtime settings. We have also introduced a single configurable for cluster admins to explicitly disable this feature if required.
- NUMA: Improving performance by mapping host NUMA topology to virtual machine topology.
- GPU assignment: An oldie but a goodie: Assign GPUs and vGPUs to virtual machines.
This version of KubeVirt includes upgraded virtualization technology based on libvirt 10.5.0 and QEMU 9.0.0. Other KubeVirt-specific features of this release include the following:
Virtualization
In the interest of security, we have restricted the ability of virt-handler to patch nodes, and removed privileges for the cluster. You can also now live-update tolerations to a running VM.
Our KubeVirt command line tool, virtctl, also received some love and improved functionality for VM creation, image upload, and source inference.
Networking
The networking binding plugins have matured to Beta, and we have a new domain attachment type,managedTap, and the ability to reserve memory overhead for binding plugins. Network binding plugins enable vendors to provide their own VM-to-network plumbing alongside KubeVirt.
We also added support for the igb network interface model.
Storage
If you’ve ever wanted to migrate your virtual machine volume from one storage type to another then you’ll be interested in our volume migration feature.
Scale and Performance
Our SIG scale and performance team have added performance benchmarks for resource utilization of virt-controller and virt-api components. Furthermore, the test-suite was enhanced by integrating KWOK with SIG-scale tests to simulate nodes and VMIs for testing KubeVirt performance while using minimum resources in test infrastructure. A comprehensive list of performance and scale benchmarks for the release is available here.
Thanks!
A lot of work from a huge amount of people go into these releases. Some contributions are small, such as raising a bug or attending our community meeting, and others are massive, like working on a feature or reviewing PRs. Whatever your part: we thank you.
And if you’re interested in contributing to the project and being a part of the next release, please check out our contributing guide and our community membership guidelines.