Guest: Rob Hirschfeld (LinkedIn)
Company: RackN
Show Name: KubeStruck
Topic: Cloud Native

VMware‘s market dominance is facing its most credible challenge yet, and it’s coming from an unexpected direction: Kubernetes-based virtualization. For years, KubeVirt has been the industry’s best-kept secret, quietly maturing in production environments while enterprises struggled with VMware’s pricing changes and vendor lock-in. Now, as organizations actively search for alternatives, Kubernetes virtualization is emerging as more than just a theoretical option—it’s becoming a practical path forward.

Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Co-Founder of RackN, has been on the front lines of this shift. His company specializes in infrastructure automation and Kubernetes operations, helping enterprises navigate the complex terrain of modern virtualization. In a recent conversation, Hirschfeld shared why KubeVirt and OpenShift Virtualization are gaining serious traction and what it actually takes to make the transition from VMware to Kubernetes-based infrastructure.

The Technology Behind the Movement

Kubernetes virtualization isn’t about reinventing the wheel. At its core, it leverages KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), the same Linux virtualization technology that powers many existing platforms. What makes KubeVirt different is how it brings VM management into the Kubernetes control plane, allowing organizations to manage virtual machines using the same APIs and workflows they use for containers.

“Fundamentally, virtualization is managed by a virtualization layer for Linux, that’s KVM,” Hirschfeld explains. “When we talk about KubeVirt for Kubernetes, we’re really talking about the control plane for the VMs, much more than we’re talking about the actual hypervisor.”

This distinction matters. VMware’s strength has never been just about the hypervisor—it’s about the entire ecosystem of storage, networking, administrative tools, and adjacent services like backup and disaster recovery. KubeVirt, wrapped by distributions like OpenShift Virtualization from Red Hat, is now offering comparable capabilities but with the flexibility and openness that enterprises are increasingly demanding.

The project has been in the Kubernetes community for years, steadily maturing. OpenShift Virtualization, in particular, represents a highly aligned product on top of KubeVirt with minimal differences from the upstream project. This means organizations get a mature way to run virtual machines using Kubernetes APIs, complete with live migration, networking, and storage management.

What’s Holding Back Broader Adoption

Despite the technology’s maturity, adoption has been slower than many expected. Hirschfeld is candid about why VMware remains dominant. “VMware has a lot going for it that people tend to forget,” he notes. “It has a very concrete storage approach, a very concrete networking approach, and a lot of administrative tools which a lot of people affectionately call click ops.”

That last point is crucial. VMware built its empire on making virtualization accessible to administrators who didn’t need to master command-line interfaces or automation frameworks. You could manage an entire VMware environment through a graphical interface, with standardized approaches to common tasks. The ecosystem of certified partners, backup solutions, and disaster recovery tools created a turnkey experience that worked right out of the box.

For years, Kubernetes virtualization struggled to match this. The perception persisted that running VMs on Kubernetes meant becoming a YAML expert, mastering GitOps workflows, and hiring platform engineering teams. But Hirschfeld argues this perception is outdated. “The concern that you have to become a Kubernetes pro—and an app developer or a platform team—to run virtualization, that messaging is off-point based on what we’ve been experiencing with our customers.”

In the past year, the ecosystem has evolved dramatically. Networking and network isolation have improved. Automatic failover and live migration capabilities now work reliably. Storage options have expanded. Perhaps most importantly, administrative UX and portals have emerged that let traditional virtualization admins manage the environment without deep Kubernetes expertise.

The Practical Path Forward

For IT leaders evaluating whether KubeVirt can actually replace VMware, Hirschfeld offers a dose of realism: it’s not going to be a complete, immediate replacement. “Executives are looking not just at whether they can deliver this, but whether they can deliver it quickly. Can they beat their next VMware renewal cycle?” he says. The timeline matters, and rushing into a full migration without proper planning is a recipe for failure.

RackN has focused on making the initial deployment turnkey, with customers able to stand up OpenShift Virtualization in hours rather than weeks or months. But deployment is just the beginning. The real question is which workloads to migrate first and how to build expertise along the way.

Hirschfeld’s recommendation is counterintuitive but practical: start by running your Kubernetes workloads on Kubernetes virtualization. “The most logical workload to start with is to migrate your Kubernetes workloads onto that,” he explains. “That’s actually a really nice workload.”

This approach has several advantages. First, Kubernetes workloads typically don’t require the specialized networking or storage features that make some applications dependent on VMware. Second, your teams already understand these workloads and can evaluate whether the virtualization platform is performing adequately. Third, it allows you to build a dedicated virtualization cluster optimized for that specific purpose, separate from your application development Kubernetes environments.

The strategy is about isolation and learning. Build a virtualization platform that just does virtualization. Don’t try to commingle VMs and containers in the same cluster or force your application development teams to change their workflows. Treat OpenShift Virtualization as a drop-in replacement for the virtualization layer, maintaining separate lifecycles and management domains.

After establishing this foundation with Kubernetes workloads, organizations can identify other applications that don’t have hard dependencies on VMware-specific features. Some workloads will be constrained—applications certified only for VMware, or those requiring specific backup solutions—but Hirschfeld notes there’s significant low-hanging fruit beyond just Kubernetes.

The goal isn’t immediate, complete VMware elimination. It’s about starting the migration, minimizing license costs over time, and building toward an open, flexible infrastructure that isn’t locked to a single vendor.

The Broader Infrastructure Play

What makes Kubernetes virtualization particularly compelling is how it fits into the larger infrastructure transformation many organizations are pursuing. Hirschfeld points out that the work RackN does for OpenShift Virtualization is nearly identical to what they do for OpenShift AI deployments. “The only difference between those two workloads is installing virtualization capabilities or installing AI capabilities after you’ve built and managed the cluster.”

This convergence matters. Organizations aren’t just replacing VMware—they’re building platforms that can support virtualization, AI workloads, and cloud-native applications on a common foundation. The flexibility to mix and match hardware vendors, design custom networking topologies, and avoid rigid architectural constraints represents a fundamental shift from the VMware model.

The cloud-native practices that come with Kubernetes—GitOps, infrastructure as code, immutable operating systems—also represent a more modern approach to infrastructure management. “I think that is a much more productive way, ultimately, to run your infrastructure,” Hirschfeld argues. For organizations looking to modernize operations and not just swap hypervisors, Kubernetes virtualization offers a path toward more dynamic, automated infrastructure.

Industry Response and Vendor Positioning

When it comes to vendor support, the landscape is uneven. Red Hat has fully committed to OpenShift Virtualization, having decommissioned its other virtualization platforms. Other major distributors like SUSE and Canonical haven’t shown the same level of momentum, with most taking a vertically integrated approach that limits flexibility.

Hirschfeld sees this as both a challenge and an opportunity. RackN’s approach is to create separation between the bare metal automation layer and what runs on top of it. “You can bring whatever you need to it,” he explains. “You can bring in Nutanix, you can bring in Proxmox, you can bring in VMware, you can bring in Hyper-V.”

This flexibility matters because most enterprises won’t have a single virtualization platform. They’ll need to support multiple technologies during transition periods and possibly long-term. The question becomes which vendors are building the administrative tooling and click-ops interfaces that make Kubernetes virtualization accessible to traditional virtualization teams.

Hirschfeld doesn’t expect these tools to become community projects. Like the management layers that differentiated VMware from simple KVM implementations, he anticipates that administrative interfaces will be part of each distribution’s unique value proposition.

Looking Ahead

Is Kubernetes-based virtualization destined to become the default model for enterprises, or will it remain a niche option? Hirschfeld is cautiously optimistic but realistic about the timeline. “It’s a little early to tell,” he admits. But the appetite is clearly there, driven by both VMware’s pricing changes and the broader push toward cloud-native infrastructure.

The fact that even OpenStack deployments are now recommending Kubernetes as the underlay suggests momentum is building. Kubernetes is lightweight, powerful, and increasingly well-understood across the industry. While some CLI work and YAML configuration will always be necessary, the barrier to entry continues to drop.

The clearest indicator of success will be whether organizations can move beyond pilots to production deployments at scale, building the expertise and ecosystem support needed to truly challenge VMware’s dominance. Based on current trends and the maturation of the technology, that future looks increasingly achievable.

For IT leaders evaluating their virtualization strategy, the message is clear: Kubernetes-based virtualization isn’t just a future possibility—it’s a present option worth serious consideration. The question isn’t whether it can replace VMware, but which workloads make sense to migrate first and how quickly you can build the capabilities needed to make the transition successful.

Watch the full conversation with Rob Hirschfeld on YouTube to explore these topics in greater depth and understand whether Kubernetes virtualization fits your infrastructure roadmap.