How to Connect Nested KubeVirt Clusters with Calico and BGP Peering
Running Kubernetes inside Kubernetes isn’t just a fun experiment anymore – it’s becoming a key pattern for delivering multi-environment platforms at scale. With KubeVirt, a virtualization add-on for Kubernetes that uses QEMU (an open-source machine emulator and virtualizer), you can run full-featured Kubernetes clusters as virtual machines (VMs) inside a parent Kubernetes cluster. This nested architecture makes it possible to unify containerized and virtualized workloads, and opens the door to new platform engineering use cases.
But here’s the challenge: how can you ensure that these nested clusters, and the workloads within, can reach, and be reached by, your physical network and are treated the same way as any other cluster?
That’s where Calico’s Advanced BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) peering with workloads comes into play. By enabling BGP route exchange between the parent cluster and nested KubeVirt VMs, Calico extends dynamic routing directly to virtualized workloads. This allows nested clusters to participate in the broader network topology and advertise their pod and service IPs just like any other node. Thus eliminating the need for tunnels or overlays to achieve true layer 3 connectivity.
In this blog, we’ll walk through the big picture, prerequisites, and step-by-step configuration for setting up BGP Continue reading