vcluster

Tenant Clusters for Production Kubernetes and AI Infrastructure

Virtual control planes, real isolation — from a single node to 100K-GPU superclusters.

Website • Quickstart • Documentation • Blog • Slack

    

CNCF Certified Kubernetes — Distribution · Kubernetes AI Conformant (v1.35)

What is vCluster?

vCluster creates Tenant Clusters — fully isolated Kubernetes environments that run on top of a Control Plane Cluster, on dedicated infrastructure, or standalone on bare metal. Each tenant gets its own API server, CRDs, and RBAC, with a cluster experience indistinguishable from a dedicated Kubernetes cluster.

Built for production. Trusted in production. 40M+ Tenant Clusters deployed by teams at Adobe, CoreWeave, NVIDIA, Lintasarta, Atlan, Deloitte, and hundreds of AI clouds, AI factories, and Fortune 500 platform organizations.

CNCF Certified Kubernetes — Distribution and Kubernetes AI Conformant (v1.35) — every Tenant Cluster is upstream Kubernetes with no vendor lock‑in, validated for portable AI/ML workloads (training, inference, agentic).

The public-cloud experience, on your own infrastructure. Give every team the Kubernetes they need — with strict isolation, hardware-aware scheduling, and zero tenant sprawl — whether you run one region or 100K GPUs.

🚀 Quick Start

# Install vCluster CLI
brew install loft-sh/tap/vcluster

# Create a Tenant Cluster
vcluster create my-vcluster --namespace team-x

# Use kubectl as usual — you're now in your Tenant Cluster
kubectl get namespaces

Prerequisites: A running Kubernetes cluster and kubectl configured. Or go straight to bare metal with vCluster Standalone.

👉 Full Quickstart Guide

🐳 Run Locally with Docker — vind

No Kubernetes cluster? Run vCluster directly on Docker with vind (vCluster in Docker) — like kind, but with the full vCluster feature set (UI, sleep/resume, LoadBalancer, image cache):

vcluster create my-vcluster --driver docker
kubectl get namespaces

🎮 Try in the Browser

🎁 vCluster Free Tier

Real usage, not a gated demo. Unlimited Tenant Clusters up to 64 CPUs / 32 GPUs, Private Nodes, Auto Nodes, Standalone, and the Platform UI — for free. Get Started Free →

🆕 What's New

👉 Full Changelog

🎯 Use Cases

🏗️ Architectures

vCluster supports multiple deployment architectures. Each builds on the previous, offering progressively stronger isolation — from dense shared infrastructure to fully standalone bare metal.

Architecture Comparison

👉 Full Architecture Guide

Minimal Configuration

🔹 Shared Nodes — Maximum density, minimum cost

Tenant Clusters share the Control Plane Cluster's nodes. Workloads run as regular pods in a namespace.

sync:
  fromHost:
    nodes:
      enabled: false  # Uses pseudo nodes

🔹 Dedicated Nodes — Isolated compute on labeled node pools

Tenant Clusters get their own set of labeled nodes on the Control Plane Cluster. Workloads are isolated but still managed by the Control Plane Cluster.

sync:
  fromHost:
    nodes:
      enabled: true
      selector:
        labels:
          tenant: my-tenant

🔹 Private Nodes ^v0.27+ — Full CNI/CSI isolation

External nodes join the Tenant Cluster directly with their own CNI, CSI, and networking stack. Complete workload isolation from the Control Plane Cluster.

privateNodes:
  enabled: true
controlPlane:
  service:
    spec:
      type: NodePort

🔹 vCluster Standalone ^v0.29+ — No Control Plane Cluster required

Run vCluster without any Control Plane Cluster. Deploy the Virtual Control Plane directly on bare metal or VMs. The highest level of isolation — vCluster becomes the cluster.

controlPlane:
  standalone:
    enabled: true
    joinNode:
      enabled: true
privateNodes:
  enabled: true

⚡ Auto Nodes ^v0.28+ — Karpenter-powered dynamic autoscaling

Automatically provision and deprovision private nodes based on workload demand. Works across public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, and bare metal environments.

autoNodes:
  enabled: true
  nodeProvider: <provider>
privateNodes:
  enabled: true

✨ Key Features

🌐 The vCluster Platform

vCluster is the foundation of a broader platform for running production Kubernetes and AI infrastructure on your own hardware — from a single rack to 100K-GPU supercomputers.

Together these deliver the four layers of an AI factory: Certified Stacks → Tenant Isolation → Tenant Clusters → GPU Infrastructure Operations — the same pattern used to run production AI on hundreds of GPU clouds and Fortune 500 on-prem platforms.

🏢 Trusted By

Also used by: NVIDIA, ABBYY, Precisely, Shipwire, and many more — with 50+ GPU clouds and Fortune 500s running vCluster in production.

👉 View All Case Studies

📚 Learn More

👉 YouTube Channel • Blog

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! Check out our Contributing Guide to get started.

🔗 Links

📜 License

vCluster is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.