Ruckos Virtualization

Subscription Shock

The Broadcom acquisition of VMware has fundamentally disrupted the enterprise technology landscape. Many IT organizations, including this one, are actively executing migration strategies out of the VMware ecosystem.

Alternatives

Some enterprises are choosing to move to public clouds like Azure, while others are exploring reducing or even eliminating VMware licensing by switching to open-source alternatives like Kubernetes to regain control over their infrastructure costs. Technical teams are increasingly evaluating open-source Hypervisors and container orchestration engines to reduce vendor lock-in and improve flexibility.

Ruckos-V Manager

Enterprise virtualization,
without the costly license

The free desktop console for Ruckos hypervisors. It keeps the layout every Hyper-V admin already knows — tree, VM list, actions, details — and adds what Hyper-V Manager never had and vSphere charges for.

Ruckos-V Manager showing a three-host Ruckos cluster named lab, the VMs running on the selected hypervisor, and the host's hardware, disks, and VM store usage

Ruckos-V Manager · bare-metal to private cloud in minutes.

Ruckos Virtualization

Ruckos Linux
morphs into a hypervisor

Ruckos Virtualization is Ruckos Linux running in the hypervisor role. The same 155 MB immutable image that boots a Kubernetes node boots a KVM host — read-only, no SSH, no package manager, no agent to patch. Nothing between your workloads and the metal except a kernel.

Type1 Bare-metal hypervisor

155MB Host OS image

10s Host boot time

1 API for CLI, console & cloud

0 Per-socket licenses

~~VMware ESXi~~ Ruckos

Replace VMware

Drop the vSphere and vCenter subscription without dropping virtualization. Ruckos installs on the ESXi hosts you already own and keeps the hardware in service.

No per-core or per-socket hypervisor licensing
Open-source KVM / QEMU underneath
HP, Dell, Cisco, Supermicro, Lenovo — your hardware

~~Windows Hyper-V~~ Ruckos

Replace Windows

No Windows Server underneath the hypervisor, no Patch Tuesday for the host, no domain join to protect. The familiar Hyper-V Manager workflow stays — the Windows attack surface goes.

Ruckos-V Manager — clustering made easy
Pass the audit — on the first try
No complicated setups

Built for cloud-native

Designed for microservices and lightweight container or serverless workloads. A VM created on a Ruckos hypervisor becomes a Ruckos Linux Kubernetes node in about two minutes.

Optimized for containerized workloads
Small, fast VMs sized for one service each
State of the art efficiency — for managing memory

Architecture

From bare metal
to managed microservices

One immutable OS, one hardware virtualization layer, one HTTPS API. Every management surface — the desktop console, the CLI, and Ruckos Cloud — drives the same node API, so there is never a second control channel to secure.

Bare metal. Ruckos Virtualization runs directly on the physical server — there is no general-purpose operating system, no hypervisor appliance, and no management VM to install first.

Immutable host. The hypervisor boots from the same signed, read-only Ruckos Linux image as every other node. Turning a node into a hypervisor is one command and one reboot.

API first. Hosts expose a declarative HTTPS API on :8443. Ruckos-V Manager, rctl, and Ruckos Cloud all speak to it — there is no SSH, no agent, and nothing to shell into.

KVM / QEMU — hardware-accelerated virtualization with virtio devices
VM stores — any local NVMe or SSD becomes a thin-provisioned VM store
Any guest — Ruckos Linux nodes, Linux, or Windows from an uploaded ISO
Private console — the VM screen streams over the API; VNC is never exposed on the network

Management Ruckos-V Manager · rctl CLI · Ruckos Cloud

Node API — HTTPS :8443 Declarative · TLS · VMs · disks · cluster · console · host stats

Virtual Machines Ruckos Linux Kubernetes nodes · Linux · Windows · OS + data disks

KVM / QEMU Hardware virtualization · virtio · thin-provisioned VM stores

Ruckos Linux — hypervisor role Immutable · read-only rootfs · no SSH · no systemd · signed image

Bare-metal hardware HP · Dell · Cisco · Supermicro · Lenovo · your servers

Power-on to hypervisor

One command,
one reboot

Boot Ruckos Linux on the server, point rctl at it, and it comes back as a hypervisor with a formatted VM store. Create VMs from the same prompt — or from Ruckos-V Manager — and they start right away.

rctl — 192.168.1.11

Boot Ruckos Linux

~1 min

Install the signed image to the server's OS disk. Ten seconds later it is on the network with its API up.

Make it a hypervisor

one reboot

rctl hypervisor init formats the VM store and reboots the node into the hypervisor role.

Join a Ruckos cluster

seconds

Create a named cluster on the first host; the rest join through it. etcd forms on the hosts themselves.

Create VMs

instant

rctl vm create uploads the ISO once, carves a thin disk from the store, and starts the VM.

Ruckos cluster

Hypervisors that
cluster themselves

Physical hypervisors join a named Ruckos cluster. Cluster state lives in etcd, and etcd runs on the hosts — no vCenter appliance, no Windows Failover Cluster, no external database to stand up first.

Ruckos cluster · 3 hosts · etcd 3/3

host-01 10.0.0.11

etcd leader

cp-1 worker-1

host-02 10.0.0.12

etcd member

cp-2 worker-2

host-03 10.0.0.13

etcd member

cp-3 worker-3

15-second host lease learner → member promotion cluster CA signs every host

etcd grows with the cluster

1 – 2 hosts 1 etcd member

3 – 4 hosts 3 etcd members

5 or more hosts 5 etcd members

Every host keeps a 15-second lease in etcd. A host that stops checking in shows as lost in Ruckos-V Manager and rctl cluster status — nothing fails silently.

Virtual machines

Everything a VM needs,
nothing it doesn't

Create, size, grow, connect, and monitor — from the desktop console or the CLI. Each operation is a single call to the host API.

Create

CPUs, memory, OS disk, optional data disk
ISO uploaded once from your PC, reused after
Pick the VM store on multi-disk hosts
Starts immediately on creation

Disks & stores

Thin-provisioned — 1T only uses what's written
Add or remove data disks
Grow the OS disk while the VM is running
Multiple NVMe / SSD stores per host

Run

Start, graceful shut down, or turn off
Change memory while running; CPUs while stopped
Autostart with the host
Delete the VM and its disks in one step

Console

Double-click a VM to connect, like Hyper-V
Screen streams over the host API (TLS)
QEMU's VNC is never opened on the network
Watch the install, fix the boot, no SSH needed

Monitor

Per-VM state, CPU, memory, disk, store
Host system, BIOS, CPU, memory, physical disks
VM store usage with per-VM breakdown
Cluster hosts alive or lost, etcd role per host

Become a Kubernetes node

Boot the Ruckos Linux ISO inside the VM
rctl scan finds it like any bare-metal node
Assign etcd, control-plane, or worker
rctl bootstrap — cluster in about two minutes

Management

Three ways in,
one API

Use the console you already know, script it from the CLI, or run a fleet from Ruckos Cloud. They all speak the same node API, so what you see in one is exactly what the other sees.

Free

Ruckos-V Manager

Windows desktop console

The Hyper-V Manager experience for Ruckos: connect to a server or scan a subnet, see clusters and hosts in the tree, VMs in the list, actions on the right, hardware and store usage below.

Request the console Free

rctl

Command-line interface

The same CLI that bootstraps Kubernetes clusters initializes hypervisors, forms Ruckos clusters, and manages VMs. Script it, pipeline it, run it from any machine on the network.

Read the docs Licensed

Ruckos Cloud

Private & hybrid cloud

Hypervisors, VMs, and the Kubernetes clusters running on them in one GitOps-driven platform — multi-tenant, self-service, observable from the kernel up, and extendable into Azure.

Explore Ruckos Cloud

Every surface calls the node API over TLS on https://<host>:8443 — no SSH, no agents, no second control channel.

Side by side

Less to license,
less to attack

The legacy hypervisors were built when the host was a general-purpose server. Ruckos is built for microservices and cloud-native workloads.

	Ruckos Virtualization	VMware ESXi / vSphere	Windows Hyper-V
Host operating system	Ruckos Linux — 155 MB, highly optimized	ESXi — proprietary hypervisor OS	Windows Server with the Hyper-V role
Hypervisor licensing	Free with Ruckos	Per-core subscription	Windows Server licensing per core
Remote shell on the host	API only	SSH and ESXi shell (disabled by policy)	RDP, WinRM, PowerShell remoting
Host patching	Very little	ESXi patch baselines via vCenter	Windows Update / Patch Tuesday
Management plane	Desktop console and CLI for Windows, Mac, or Linux; Web-based	vCenter Server appliance	Hyper-V Manager, SCVMM, Windows Admin Center
Clustering	Ruckos cluster; strongly consistent, distributed key-value store	vSphere cluster managed by vCenter	Windows Failover Clustering + Active Directory
Kubernetes nodes	Ruckos Linux; purpose built to run as Kubernetes nodes	Tanzu is an add-on	AKS on Azure Local add-on
Hardware	Anything that runs ESXi or Hyper-V today	VMware compatibility list	Windows Server certified hardware

Product names are trademarks of their respective owners. Comparison reflects publicly documented product behavior at time of writing.

Assessments

We provide complete and detailed infrastructure assessments in as little as 10 days. Our assessments help organizations understand their current environment, footprint, and hardware capabilities. We help identify opportunities for cost savings by reducing or eliminating VMware and Horizon licenses, performance improvements, and modernization strategies. Our assessments provide actionable insights to guide your infrastructure decisions and help you plan for the future. We can tell you exactly how to build a migration path off VMware and onto Ruckos Cloud — on the hardware you already own.

A fleet of virtual machines migrating onto a three-node Ruckos cluster

On-Prem Cost Savings

Run Ruckos on your existing servers
No forklift hardware refresh
Lower power and datacenter footprint
ROI modeling against current spend

License Optimization

Eliminate VMware & vSphere licensing
Drop Horizon VDI costs
Per-core / per-socket cost analysis
Consolidated support contracts

VM Management Savings

Self-service provisioning
Automated lifecycle management
Fewer admin hours per VM

Assessment Findings

Performance: workload & bottleneck analysis
Security: eBPF-enforced hardening via Tetragon & Cilium
Compliance: regulatory reporting
Capacity planning for what's next

Already on VMware or Hyper-V?

We assess your hosts, VLANs, storage, and licensing in as little as ten days and hand you a migration path onto the Ruckos platform and Ruckos Cloud — on the hardware you already own.

Plan the migration Talk to us

A legacy VMware host migrating onto Ruckos Virtualization

Ruckos products

Linux. Virtualization. Cloud.

One operating system underneath all three.

Enterprise virtualization,without the costly license

Ruckos Linuxmorphs into a hypervisor

Replace VMware

Replace Windows

Built for cloud-native

From bare metalto managed microservices

One command,one reboot

Hypervisors thatcluster themselves

Everything a VM needs,nothing it doesn't

Create

Disks & stores

Run

Console

Monitor

Become a Kubernetes node

Three ways in,one API

Ruckos-V Manager

rctl

Ruckos Cloud

Less to license,less to attack

On-Prem Cost Savings

License Optimization

VM Management Savings

Assessment Findings

Already on VMware or Hyper-V?

Linux. Virtualization. Cloud.

Ruckos Linux