k8s-device-plugin VS kubevirt

K8s-device-plugin

This framework allows the use of external devices (e.g., NVIDIA GPUs, AMD GPUS, SR-IOV NICs) without modifying core Kubernetes components.

GPU Operator Device plugin

If you ever tried to use GPU-based instances with AWS ECS, or on EKS using the default Nvidia plugin, you would know that it's not possible to make a task/pod shared the same GPU on an instance. If you want to add more replicas to your service (for redundancy or load balancing), you would need one GPU for each replica.

Some notes on Plex/Emby/Kodi and transcoding. If you want true transcoding with GPU acceleration, you have to have Nvidia GPU or be a k8s device plugin genius. The whole idea of mounting elastic devices in k8s is fairly new and rather complex. In the mean time transcoding is best done on a beefy device with a proper CPU (eg i7) or specifically Nvidia GPU because there are numerous pre-made plugins. I just run Plex and Emby on an old ATX gaming machine without GPU acceleration and it works totally fine. They were barely usable for just me when running on the RPis, wouldn't recommend it unless you can figure out how to mount the correct devices in the pod using a custom raspberry pi device plugin . . . lol good luck! - Arm labs device manager: https://community.arm.com/developer/research/b/articles/posts/a-smarter-device-manager-for-kubernetes-on-the-edge - Deis labs Akri device manager: https://github.com/deislabs/akri - Nvidia GPU plugin: https://github.com/NVIDIA/k8s-device-plugin

Thanks for jumping in to help! So maybe I’m missing something - isn’t this only for Kubevirt? My setup is just a regular Ubuntu 20.04 VM with the GPU passed through. K3s from Rancher Labs (https://k3s.io/) is then running inside that VM. I’m using the NVIDIA Device Plugin Daemonset as well: https://github.com/NVIDIA/k8s-device-plugin

First, download virtctl for ARM: https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt/releases/tag/v1.1.0-alpha.0

We are even using Docker Hub to store and distribute VM images...

https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt/blob/main/containerimag...

Docker Desktop runs dockerd in a Linux VM with Apple's hypervisor framework. You can also run containers in a Linux VM with Parallels or VMware Fusion hypervisors. But you can't run VMs inside those VMs as it stands today. This works fine on Intel Macs which means you can't experiment and use KVM - one of the killer features of Linux and things like https://kubevirt.io/

Proxmox VE can run VMs and LXC containers (see my comment below on LXC). Kubernetes can run OCI containers, but there's also KubeVirt for running VMs.

Another option would be something like KubeVirt but that is a different use case where you are actually running a VM in a container for hard-to-containerize workloads.

It can, kubevirt is a project for running VMs https://kubevirt.io/ and there have been more esoteric things like WASM (https://github.com/krustlet/krustlet).

Run kubernetes. Automatically clusters everything together. You CAN run VMs on kubernetes too. https://kubevirt.io/

Perhaps for this reason we see that some orchestration systems (e.g. https://kubevirt.io/, https://fly.io/blog/docker-without-docker/ ) added support for virtual machines. And also more and more projects try to keep up with the Firecracker platform.

On the plus side if your company is good with kubernetes then everything becomes kubernetes based with harvester and rancher since a VM just becomes another kubernetes resource. This is the general direction that Rancher and Openshift are trying to move to to take on companies like vmware and even cloud solutions like openstack. If you would like to learn more about this check out the kubevirt project https://kubevirt.io/