enrichman

This is not a side product but it's currently GA and part of the Rancher Prime offering. :)

As I understand it, the virtual cluster pods are treated as standard workloads by the host. This means if you scale the nodes up or down, they will be rescheduled accordingly. You can currently use node selectors to manage this behavior, though we are developing a more flexible approach using affinity rules.

In virtual mode, the only pods running directly on the host are the K3s servers and agents. All "virtual cluster pods" run within these components, meaning they do not appear as individual pods on the host cluster.

The only trade-off is that K3s currently requires privileged mode to operate. We are actively exploring ways to address this limitation and improve security, such as implementing user namespaces or microVMs.

Hi everyone! I’m one of the maintainers of K3k at SUSE.

It’s really exciting to see this on the front page. The project actually started during a SUSE Hackweek by my colleague Hussein. It was initially envisioned as a "Kubernetes version of k3d," but it evolved into something more ambitious and eventually became a real product. We’ve always been big believers in the power of open source. For the current default "shared" mode, we even experimented with Virtual Kubelet, another CNCF project, during our development process.

I’ll be hanging around the thread today, so if you have any questions about the history, the tech stack, or where we're headed next, feel free to ask!