Many organizations run two environments side by side today: long-running virtual machines and new containerized applications. That often means two platforms, with two consoles, two backup systems and two access models.
With the virtualization capability of an enterprise Kubernetes platform, virtual machines run on the same platform as containers, under the same rules. In practice:
Older applications can stay on virtual machines
An application that can’t move to containers runs as a virtual machine on the same platform, and you modernize in the order you choose.
One network, one storage layer, one access model
Virtual machines and containers talk on the same virtual network and take disks from the same storage.
One pipeline covers both
Virtual machine definitions live in code like container definitions, and changes go through the same approval flow.
Workloads restart after a failure
When a physical server fails, its workloads restart on healthy servers.
For organizations reviewing their virtualization costs, this architecture brings two platforms down to one.
Related service:
Enterprise Kubernetes Platform Deployment & Operations