Tenant Clusters for AI clouds, AI factories, and production Kubernetes

Run your infrastructure like a hyperscaler. Every team, customer, and training run gets its own isolated cluster.

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CNCF Certified Kubernetes · Distribution · Kubernetes AI Conformant

About

vCluster creates Tenant Clusters: fully isolated environments delivered as managed Kubernetes, or as the foundation for Slurm, Ray, Run:ai and inference clusters. Each gets its own API server, CRDs and RBAC, and runs on an existing cluster or standalone on bare metal. CNCF Certified Kubernetes.

Every cluster becomes a product you can ship. Sell it to customers or serve it to internal teams from the same platform, with each tenant seeing only their own cluster and nothing else. The control plane stays invisible to tenants: no shared control plane nodes, no in-cluster agent pods, and no lateral path between environments.

Because a Tenant Cluster is upstream Kubernetes, everything built for the standard API works against it unmodified: kubectl, Helm, Argo, Crossplane, operators, and CRDs.

40M+ Tenant Clusters deployed. vCluster runs in production at Adobe, CoreWeave, NVIDIA, Nebius, Lintasarta, Atlan, Deloitte, and across 50+ AI clouds and Fortune 500 platform organizations, powering 100K+ GPUs and 1M+ CPUs.

🚀 Quick start

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

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

# Use kubectl as usual. You are now inside your Tenant Cluster.
kubectl get namespaces

Prerequisites: a running Kubernetes cluster and kubectl configured.

👉 Full quickstart guide

🐳 Run locally on Docker with vind

No Kubernetes cluster? Run a complete Tenant Cluster in Docker containers with vind (vCluster in Docker). Like kind, but with the full vCluster feature set: UI, sleep and resume, LoadBalancer, image cache, and external nodes joining over VPN.

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

🎮 Try it in the browser

🎁 vCluster free tier

Real usage, not a gated demo. Unlimited Tenant Clusters up to 64 CPUs and 32 GPUs, plus the full vCluster Platform UI, for free. Get started free →

🧩 Every kind of cluster

One platform turns raw compute into the cluster type each tenant actually asks for. Kubernetes is the foundation; the rest are delivered on top of it.

Slurm, Ray, Run:ai, inference, and agent sandbox clusters are delivered through vCluster Platform. This repository is the open-source engine that every one of them is built on.

👉 See all cluster types

🏗️ Architectures

vCluster supports multiple deployment architectures. Two things vary independently: where the control plane runs (an existing Kubernetes cluster, a standalone binary, or Docker) and how tenant workloads are placed (shared nodes or private nodes). The modes below combine them, offering progressively stronger isolation from dense shared infrastructure through to fully standalone deployments on 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, through a token-based process. No cross-tenant visibility, and complete infrastructure separation from the Control Plane Cluster. Nodes can also join over an encrypted VPN overlay ^v0.30+, so one Tenant Cluster can span sites, networks, and clouds.

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

🔹 vCluster Standalone ^v0.29+: no Control Plane Cluster required

A complete, zero-dependency Kubernetes distribution. Run the whole control plane as a self-contained binary directly on bare metal or VMs. This is how providers solve the "cluster one" problem when building infrastructure from scratch.

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. Node profiles ^v0.36+ let each pool carry its own node configuration.

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

vcluster create my-vcluster --driver docker

✨ Key features

Shared platform stack, resource syncing, and Control Plane Cluster integrations apply in Shared and Dedicated Nodes modes, where the Tenant Cluster reuses the Control Plane Cluster's CNI, CSI, and platform stack. Private Nodes and Standalone deployments bring their own CNI, CSI, and platform components.

🆕 What's new

👉 Full changelog

🎯 Who runs vCluster

Start turnkey with the vCluster Platform UI and CLI, or call the APIs and put your own portal and brand in front. It is a two-way door, with no re-platforming.

🌐 The vCluster stack

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

Together they provide the full stack for an AI factory: certified Kubernetes, isolated Tenant Clusters, runtime workload sandboxing, and GPU infrastructure operations. The ClusterMAX™ security criteria call for strong isolation between tenants, and name vNode Private Nodes.

🏢 Trusted by

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

👉 View all case studies

📚 Learn more

Featured in 4 books on Kubernetes and platform engineering.

👉 YouTube channel · Blog · Resources

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions. Check out the contributing guide to get started.

💬 Connect with us

• Join our Slack community, 5K+ engineers
• Follow on LinkedIn, 28K+
• Follow on X, 3.7K+
• Watch on YouTube
• Read the blog
• Book a consultation

📜 License

vCluster is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.