KubeVirt speeds live migration
KubeVirt is leveraging Mayastor block storage to accelerate live migration of VMs inside Kubernetes, bypassing NFS bottlenecks and improving mobility for legacy stateful workloads. That development tightens the bridge between VM-based apps and cloud‑native control planes. (thenewstack.io)
The New Stack story on Mar 17, 2026 was written by Tiago Castro and frames recent KubeVirt storage experiments at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon EU 2026. (thenewstack.io) KubeVirt’s live‑migration capability requires the VM disk PVC to be mounted with ReadWriteMany (RWX), a hard prerequisite the KubeVirt user guide documents for memory-and-disk handoff between source and target nodes. (kubevirt.io) Mayastor is an OpenEBS project implemented as a container‑native block engine that exposes SPDK-backed block devices and NVMe‑oF subsystems to Kubernetes for low‑latency, replicated block storage. (openebs.io) Mayastor’s design exposes NVMe‑oF namespaces and a userspace data plane to deliver near‑device performance through SPDK and TCP/RDMA transports. (deepwiki.com) OpenEBS documentation and solution guides note that, because Mayastor historically lacked native RWX semantics, deployments often used an NFS server pod plus the NFS CSI driver to present shared RWX access for KubeVirt VMs. (openebs.io) OpenEBS maintainers and the community have opened an enhancement proposal and GitHub issues (including OEP 4059 and prior RWX requests) to add RWX block/“shared block” semantics to Mayastor, signalling active work toward native RWX support. (github.com) Vendors that expose shared raw block for KubeVirt (e.g., Portworx/FlashArray Direct Access) advertise eliminating filesystem stacking and NFS network penalties to improve live‑migration throughput—an outcome OpenEBS stakeholders aim to achieve with native Mayastor RWX block support. (docs.portworx.com)
