Welcome to our monthly roundup highlighting project news, community writings, and resources devoted to the KubeVirt project!
This series is intended to be an open-source resource for developers, platform engineers, storage experts, and anyone interested in learning more about the ins-and-outs of Day 1 and Day 2 operations of virtual machines in containers with KubeVirt.
In this issue, we feature the landmark release of KubeVirt v1.8, a packed KubeVirt presence at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam (including the project’s first-ever in-person summit), and a strong set of tutorials and best practices from the community.
Project News
25-Mar: Announcing the Release of KubeVirt v1.8 by The KubeVirt Community
The KubeVirt community announced the release of v1.8, aligned with Kubernetes v1.35 and timed to coincide with KubeCon EU 2026 in Amsterdam. This is the third release under the VEP (Virt Enhancement Proposal) process, and the community reports a “real boom in proposals.” Major highlights include the Hypervisor Abstraction Layer (HAL) enabling backends beyond KVM, Intel TDX Attestation for confidential VMs, PCIe NUMA topology awareness for AI/HPC workloads, the passt network binding promoted to core, live NAD reference updates without VM restart, ContainerPath volumes, and Incremental Backup with Changed Block Tracking (CBT). The release also marked the project’s first in-person event: KubeVirt Summit Live, held at the Cloud Native Theatre on March 26th.
30-Mar: KubeVirt Gains Serious Backing as CNCF Graduation Comes Into View by Ryan Stevens, SiliconANGLE / theCUBE
Andrew Burden (Red Hat, KubeVirt community facilitator) and Ľuboslav Pivár (Red Hat, principal software engineer) spoke with theCUBE at KubeCon EU about the project’s path to CNCF graduation. Contributors now span Nvidia, Intel, AMD, IBM, and Microsoft — the latter leading the new multi-hypervisor feature through the VEP process. “We didn’t know Microsoft was an end user until they came with this really exciting, complicated idea,” Burden noted.
Community Meetings and Discussions
Ongoing: KubeVirt Community Weekly Meetings
The KubeVirt community meets weekly on Wednesdays, with SIG Performance & Scale meetings on Thursdays and SIG Storage bi-weekly meetings on Mondays. Recordings of all sessions are available on the KubeVirt YouTube channel. Check the KubeVirt Community Calendar for upcoming sessions.
17-Mar: Want Faster KubeVirt Live Migration? Learn How to Bypass NFS and Use Mayastor Block Storage by Darryl K. Taft, The New Stack
Published ahead of KubeCon EU 2026, this guest column explores how Mayastor’s replicated block storage and NVMe-oF architecture can support KubeVirt live migration without the NFS shim. The author examines the pragmatic NFS-on-Mayastor workaround for today and the cleaner multi-node block mode path for the future, with guidance on storage class scoping and access controls.
26-Mar: KubeVirt Focuses on Multi-Hypervisor Support by Techzine Global
A concise news summary of the v1.8 release for a European infrastructure audience, covering the HAL, ContainerPath volumes, and incremental backup with CBT.
31-Mar: KubeVirt v1.8 Brings Multi-Hypervisor Support and Confidential Computing to Kubernetes by Matt Saunders, InfoQ
A thorough technical analysis of the v1.8 release for a senior developer audience. Saunders contextualizes the Hypervisor Abstraction Layer as the culmination of a direction Vladik Romanovsky outlined at KubeCon NA 2025, and examines the storage, networking, and scale improvements in depth.
31-Mar: KubeVirt 1.8: The VMware Alternative Is Here by krun_pro, DEV Community
A detailed technical breakdown of the v1.8 release covering the HAL, Intel TDX attestation, PCIe NUMA topology awareness, live NAD updates, passt promotion, and incremental backup with CBT. The author frames v1.8 as the release that makes KubeVirt “a legitimate cloud native virtualization platform.”
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026 Sessions
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 (Amsterdam, March 23–26) featured a strong KubeVirt presence across multiple tracks and venues. Session recordings are available on the CNCF YouTube channel. Here are some of our favorite KubeVirt talks:
24-Mar: API is the New SSH: Forging a Zero-Trust VM Platform on Kubernetes by Evangelista Tragni, Devoteam
A breakout session exploring how to build a zero-trust VM platform on Kubernetes using KubeVirt, treating the API as the new security boundary. Multiple conference attendees singled this out as a standout session for practitioners exploring KubeVirt’s security model.
25-Mar: KubeVirt Benchmarking at Scale: A Vendor-Neutral, End-to-End Testing Framework for Cloud-Native Virtualization by Bhumitra Nagar and Dhruv Bhatnagar, Portworx by Pure Storage
An introduction to the open-source KubeVirt Performance Benchmarking Suite, a vendor-neutral framework for evaluating VM performance on Kubernetes across any distribution and CSI storage backend. The talk covers benchmarking VM creation, boot storms, live migration, storage behavior, capacity limits, and failure recovery.
26-Mar: KubeVirt’s Evolution: Governance, Features, and Community Growth by Sreeja Varnam (NVIDIA) and Luboslav Pivár (Red Hat) — Maintainer Track
The official KubeVirt Maintainer Track session at KubeCon EU 2026, covering the project’s governance model, the v1.8 feature set, and the community’s growth trajectory — including the expanding contributor base from Nvidia, Intel, AMD, IBM, and Microsoft.
26-Mar: KubeVirt Summit Live: Breaking the Performance Barrier — High-Performance AI Storage Virtualization with KubeVirt by Jian Li (SK Telecom) and Yves Weisser (NetApp)
A session from the first in-person KubeVirt Summit exploring high-performance AI storage virtualization with KubeVirt, with insights from SK Telecom’s large-scale GPU cluster deployments.
26-Mar: Virtualizing Large Scale GPU Cluster for Sovereign AI: Petasus AI Cloud Journey with Kubernetes by Jian Li, SK Telecom
SK Telecom’s Jian Li presented how the Petasus AI Cloud platform uses KubeVirt to virtualize large-scale GPU clusters for sovereign AI workloads, sharing architectural decisions and lessons learned from production deployments.
Upcoming KubeVirt Events and Talks
Ongoing: KubeVirt Community Calendar
18-19 Jun: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026, Mumbai, India
9-12 Nov: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026, Salt Lake City, Utah
Call for Contributors
Do you love working with KubeVirt? Have tutorials or best practices to share? Get in touch with us!
We’d love to hear about your work and promote it. Send us a short abstract of your topic. Be sure to be clear about your intended audience. Who is this interesting for? Why? What will they get out of it?
Contact us at contributors@kubevirt.blog to get started!
Please note that we do not accept contributions that are promotional or commercial in nature (this roundup is focused on open-source) or AI-generated content.
