platform-eng

Rafay Kubernetes Alternatives with True Tenant Isolation

Need stronger isolation than Rafay without full cluster costs? vCluster virtualizes K8s control planes, giving each AI tenant a dedicated, isolated environment on shared GPU infrastructure.

Trusted by the fastest-growing AI cloud providers
Problem

Why Teams Seek Rafay Alternatives

Namespace isolation and cluster management alone leave critical gaps for GPU workloads.

Isolation Too Weak for GPU

Namespace-level isolation exposes tenants to shared blast radius, letting workloads see platform internals they should never access.

Separate Clusters Are Too Expensive

Full physical clusters per tenant destroy unit economics. Operational overhead scales faster than your GPU fleet does.

Slow to Launch, Slow to Scale

Building or extending a managed Kubernetes platform yourself takes months and significant engineering resources you do not have.

Solution

vCluster Gives Every Tenant a Real K8s Cluster

vCluster virtualizes the Kubernetes control plane itself — not just namespaces. Each tenant gets a fully isolated, CNCF-certified cluster with its own API server, etcd, and RBAC, running as a lightweight process on shared GPU infrastructure. Proven across 100K+ GPU nodes and 50+ GPU clouds.

Built for Isolation at GPU Cloud Scale

Four capabilities that set vCluster apart from Rafay Kubernetes alternatives when tenant isolation and GPU performance both matter.

Tenant Isolation

Isolated Control Planes per Tenant

Each tenant gets a fully isolated K8s control plane running as a lightweight pod — own API server, etcd, and scheduler. Spins up in seconds with near-zero marginal cost on shared GPU infrastructure.

  • Own API server per tenant
  • Seconds to provision
  • No shared blast radius
Workload Security

Kernel-Native GPU Workload Isolation

vNode (currently in private beta) wraps each workload in kernel-native security using seccomp, cgroups, namespaces, and AppArmor — preventing container breakouts without hypervisor overhead. Bare metal GPU performance is preserved.

  • Container breakout protection
  • No hypervisor overhead
  • Bare metal GPU performance
Hardware Isolation

Dedicated Physical Nodes per Tenant

For tenants requiring complete hardware separation, assign fully dedicated physical nodes with their own CNI and CSI. No workloads from any other tenant share the underlying GPU hardware.

  • Dedicated physical GPU nodes
  • Own CNI and CSI per tenant
  • Zero noisy-neighbor risk
Platform Operations

Central Fleet Management at Scale

Manage all tenant clusters from a single UI, CLI, and API. SSO, quotas, templates, and RBAC across the entire fleet — giving your operations team full visibility without per-cluster overhead.

  • Unified UI, CLI, and API
  • SSO, quotas, and templates
  • RBAC across full fleet
Standards Compliance

100% CNCF-Certified K8s Per Tenant

Every tenant cluster is a fully conformant, CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution — not a proprietary partition. Tenants get 100% API compatibility and full cluster-admin rights without affecting neighbors.

  • Full K8s API compatibility
  • Cluster-admin per tenant
  • Not a proprietary partition

Why vCluster

This isn’t a side project. Behind every vCluster deployment is 5+ years of deep K8s engineering, security hardening, and battle-tested infrastructure work at massive scale.

100K+
GPU Nodes Powered
50+
GPU Clouds & F500s
<45
Days to Launch
30K
GitHub Stars

Get Started in 3 Steps

1
Schedule a Demo

Talk to our team about your stack

2
Deploy vCluster

Deploy vCluster on your infra in minutes

3
Onboard Your Tenants

Go live with a hyperscaler-grade tenant experience in days

FAQs

What makes vCluster a strong Rafay Kubernetes alternative?

While Rafay focuses on Kubernetes fleet management and policy-based governance, vCluster virtualizes the Kubernetes control plane itself. Each tenant receives a fully isolated, CNCF-certified cluster with its own API server, etcd, and RBAC — running as a lightweight process on shared infrastructure. This gives GPU cloud operators stronger tenant isolation, faster provisioning, and significantly lower per-tenant overhead compared to full physical cluster models.

Does vCluster support GPU workloads and AI infrastructure?

Yes. vCluster is purpose-built for GPU cloud providers and AI infrastructure teams. It powers 100K+ GPU nodes in production across 50+ GPU clouds and Fortune 500 customers, including CoreWeave and Nscale. It is also named in the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD reference architecture, confirming its fit for production GPU environments.

Is vCluster's tenant isolation stronger than namespace isolation?

Yes. Namespace isolation shares the same API server across all tenants, meaning a misconfiguration or compromised workload can affect others. vCluster gives every tenant a completely separate API server and etcd, so the control plane blast radius is strongly contained. For deeper isolation, vNode (currently in private beta) adds kernel-native workload protection at the runtime level without hypervisor overhead.

How quickly can a team migrate from Rafay to vCluster?

vCluster integrates with existing Kubernetes infrastructure, GitOps pipelines, and CI/CD tooling including Terraform and Argo CD. Because each tenant cluster is CNCF-certified and API-compatible, existing workloads and tooling migrate without modification. Customers like Boost Run have launched full managed Kubernetes offerings in less than 45 days using vCluster.

Can vCluster handle both shared and dedicated GPU node models?

Yes. vCluster supports a flexible isolation spectrum: Shared Nodes for cost-efficient tenant environments, Private Nodes for full hardware separation per tenant, and Dedicated Nodes to eliminate GPU contention entirely. This lets GPU cloud operators match isolation depth to each tenant's requirements and price point without running separate physical clusters.

Is vCluster open source?

Yes. The vCluster core is open source under the Apache 2.0 license with 29.8K GitHub stars. The vCluster Platform adds enterprise capabilities including fleet management, SSO, Day 2 operations, self-service portals, and multi-region support — designed for GPU cloud providers and enterprises running tenant isolation at scale.

See Why Teams Choose vCluster Over Rafay

Book a demo and see isolated tenant clusters on GPU infrastructure in action.