Intelligent built in resilience and higher uptime in SUSE Virtualization

If you’ve run VMware at scale, three capabilities made it worth the licensing cost: DRS kept your cluster balanced without manual intervention, Storage vMotion moved volumes without downtime, and Lifecycle Manager gave you control over how upgrades rolled across your nodes. These aren’t nice-to-haves — they’re the features that separate a platform you can run in production from one you’re constantly firefighting. SUSE Virtualization  delivers all three in open source, and at KubeCon EU 2026, we’re making sure you know it.

VM Auto Balance Open Source DRS That Works

Static VM placement breaks down fast. Workload patterns shift, new applications land on already-busy nodes, and what looked like a balanced cluster six months ago is now a hotspot problem your on-call team is managing manually. VMware DRS solved this with intelligent, policy-driven rebalancing. SUSE Virtualization does the same with the VM Auto Balance add-on, built on the Kubernetes Descheduler.

Enable it via Advanced > Add-ons in the UI, set your CPU and memory thresholds, and the Descheduler continuously evaluates node utilization — evicting and rescheduling VM pods from overloaded nodes to underutilized ones. It’s fully configurable: upper thresholds (targetThresholds, default 50%) define when a node is overloaded; lower thresholds (thresholds, default 30%) define where evicted workloads can land; maxNoOfPodsToEvictPerNode controls how aggressively each cycle acts. System namespaces are excluded by default. No black-box scheduling, no per-VM licensing — just transparent, tunable rebalancing that reduces over-provisioning and takes manual live migrations off your team’s plate.

Availability: Early Access in SUSE Virtualization 1.7. GA targeted for 1.8. Descheduler documentation →

Move volumes without downtime

Storage rebalancing, hardware replacement, backend migration — these all used to mean maintenance windows, frozen applications, and tense calls with application owners. With Live Storage Migration in SUSE Virtualization 1.8, the underlying storage volume moves while the VM keeps running.

Built on Longhorn’s distributed block storage layer, the feature works by assigning VMs a migratable storage class configured for ReadWriteMany (RWX) access. Longhorn coordinates the data transfer at the storage layer; KubeVirt keeps the VM live and responsive throughout. From the application team’s perspective, nothing happened. From the operations team’s perspective, a previously high-risk event became a routine task. For teams coming from VMware, this is the Storage vMotion equivalent — no proprietary storage fabric required. Prep your storage class configuration now using the Longhorn V2 data engine docs so you’re ready when 1.8 ships.

Availability: Targeting SUSE Virtualization 1.8 (TBC). Track confirmation on the Harvester roadmap.

Upgrade Control to roll upgrades on your terms, not the platform’s

Every node upgrade in SUSE Virtualization automatically live-migrates VMs off the target node first — your workloads stay up throughout. But what happens when your ops team needs to inspect a node before the automation moves on? Or when a specific node hosts workloads that need manual handling before its upgrade proceeds? Upgrade Control, introduced in 1.7, gives you that precision.

Via the upgrade-config setting and nodeUpgradeOption, you can switch to manual mode pausing the entire upgrade rollout until your team explicitly releases each node — or specify individual node names in pauseNodes to hold specific nodes while the rest of the cluster upgrades automatically. Nodes not listed upgrade on the automated schedule; listed nodes wait for your explicit go-ahead. This embeds cleanly into existing change management workflows: approvals, verification gates, and audit trails are now part of the upgrade process, not an afterthought bolted on top of it. For teams used to vSphere Lifecycle Manager’s baseline and remediation model, this is the open-source equivalent — without the overhead.

Availability: GA in SUSE Virtualization 1.7. Upgrade documentation →

One Platform, Three Less Reasons to Stay on VMware

Together, these three capabilities remove the operational justifications that keep enterprises on VMware long after the economics have stopped making sense. Intelligent rebalancing, live storage movement, and controlled upgrade rollouts aren’t premium features –they’re baseline expectations for any platform running enterprise workloads. SUSE Virtualization delivers them in open source, with transparent configuration and a public roadmap you can contribute to.

Meet our experts at KubeCon EU 2026 in Amsterdam, or connect with a SUSE expert to explore what’s possible for your organization.

SUSE Virtualization is the enterprise distribution of Harvester, the open-source HCI platform built on Kubernetes and Longhorn. Track what’s next on the Harvester roadmap.