Mirantis k0rdent Enterprise: VMs, containers & AI in one
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America was busy.
Although some have said not ‘quite’ as busy as expected (it was -3 centigrade and there was a US government shutdown impacting travel, plus there’s something of a global recession on), the Cloud Native Computing Foundation appeared to talk up attendance and interest.
Code commits, manifested maintainer magnificence and the next 12 months’ level of vibrancy may be the best measure.
It was certainly busy enough for the Computer Weekly Open Source Inside team to miss news relating to Mirantis and the latest release of Mirantis k0rdent Enterprise, with Mirantis k0rdent Virtualization – enabling workloads to run with cloud-native applications and traditional virtualised workloads.
“Mirantis k0rdent Enterprise now converges VMs, containers and AI with a single modern infrastructure platform,” said Shaun O’Meara, chief technology officer, Mirantis. “Innovative IT teams are looking for virtualisation alternatives and as AI transforms enterprise IT requirements, now is a critical time to modernise infrastructure.”
This technology converges VMs, containers and AI and… by eliminating operational silos through unified management and orchestration, enterprises can reduce operational complexity and infrastructure costs.
“Mirantis k0rdent Enterprise enables fleet-scale virtualisation anywhere – public clouds, on-premises datacentres, edge points of presence, as well as hybrid. The platform enables full control, cost visibility, and observability for virtualised workloads, required for distributed and centralised applications,” said O’Meara.
Key features of the new Mirantis k0rdent Enterprise release include Automated Distributed Resource Balancer (DRB) for virtual machines to provide resource awareness to identify servers with sufficient available CPU and RAM and perform node balancing to ensure optimal performance without manual intervention.
There are significant updates for AI enablement in alignment with the Mirantis AI Factory Reference Architecture, including: NUMA topology preservation that supports NUMA and PCIe topology-aware VM configuration needed for GPU passthrough to deliver optimal performance.
Open source, of course
Mirantis k0rdent Enterprise uses open source k0rdent, a composable Kubernetes management platform that enables platform engineers to define, deploy and operate consistent, policy-enforced Kubernetes-native infrastructure using declarative automation, GitOps workflows, and validated templates from the Mirantis ecosystem.
Using the self-contained open source k0s, CNCF Sandbox Kubernetes distribution, k0rdent simplifies infrastructure management and accelerates digital transformation initiatives.
The new k0rdent ability to run VMs also extends to Mirantis Kubernetes Engine for k0rdent (MKE 4k), which now has the ability to run virtual machines in addition to its existing capability to run containers.
The new Mirantis k0rdent Enterprise release and MKE 4k provide alternatives to proprietary virtualisation solutions. By supporting legacy infrastructure, Mirantis k0rdent Enterprise and MKE 4k are said to be “particularly suited” for enterprises modernising application portfolios and expanding edge infrastructure with AI and cloud-native workloads.