Palette Virtual Machine (VM) Management provides a unified platform for managing containerized and virtualized applications. This solution, which requires a Palette VM Management license, allows organizations to onboard, deploy, manage, and scale VMs within the same cluster as their containerized applications. Palette VM Management simplifies managing infrastructure, improves resource utilization, and removes the cost of having a hypervisor.
Palette VM Management achieves a Kubernetes-native experience through its Spectro VM Dashboard add-on pack, which provides a user-friendly web console interface to manage VMs.
VM Management is particularly suitable in the following scenarios:
- Organizations that want to remove their virtualization infrastructure due to an aging environment or to reduce costs. Using Palette VM Management, legacy applications and modern, containerized applications can be deployed on VMs.
- Edge locations that have only a few VMs running, and a hypervisor is no longer desired.
Palette VM Management requires the following:
- Palette version 3.3.0 or higher.
- Production VMs are supported on bare metal Kubernetes clusters deployed on Canonical MAAS. To learn how to configure MAAS and create MAAS clusters in Palette, refer to the Install and Manage MAAS Gateway guide.
- VMs with Persistent Volume Claim (PVC) must have a StorageClass that supports
ReadWriteMany(RWX) access mode for seamless live migration to a different node - either when triggered manually or during a Kubernetes upgrades.
In environments that use nested virtualization, where VMs run inside of VMs due to lack of hardware to host VMs, it is technically possible to run VMs on Kubernetes by setting the KubeVirt resource useEmulation to true. However, we do not recommend this approach.
To request access to the Palette VM Management solution, please contact our support team by sending an email to support@spectrocloud.com. Kindly provide the following information in your email:
- Your full name
- Organization name (if applicable)
- Email address
- Phone number (optional)
- A brief description of your intended use for the Palette Self-host installer image.
Our dedicated support team will promptly get in touch with you to provide the necessary assistance and share credentials and an endpoint URL to access the registry that stores the Spectro VM Dashboard pack.
When you receive credentials and registry information from Spectro Cloud, you will need to add the custom registry in your Palette environment. Follow steps in Configure a Custom Pack Registry and use the provided registry URL as the endpoint.
To get started with Palette VM Management, review Dashboard Pack and Profile to learn about components of the Spectro VM Dashboard integrated pack. Next, become familiar with features of the Spectro VM Dashboard and the web interface it provides to manage your VMs.
Review Create Spectro VM Dashboard Profile and Enable Spectro VM Dashboard to learn how to create a cluster profile with the dashboard pack and gain access to the dashboard.
The dashboard provides various methods to quickly deploy VMs from out-of-the-box templates or from your organization's templates. To learn more about using and creating templates, review Deploy VM From a Template and Create a VM Template.
Palette VM Management utilizes open-source KubeVirt as a component of the Spectro VM Dashboard pack to manage VMs and enables the following KubeVirt feature gates by default:
- LiveMigration
- Snapshot
- HotplugVolumes
KubeVirt offers other feature gates you may find useful and which you can enable using Kubernetes feature gates. To enable more KubeVirt feature gates, you can modify the kubevirt.kubevirtResource.additonalFeatureGates parameter in the Spectro VM Dashboard manifest.
For more information on KubeVirt feature gates, refer to the KubeVirt user guide.