A bottom-up path to understanding the vNode architecture — the runtime substitutions it makes at the OCI boundary, the kernel primitives it relies on, the components that ship with it, and the opt-in mechanisms that pods use to select it.
The goal is conceptual mastery of the architecture. Failure modes and on-call practice are out of scope; the team learns those on the job from real tickets.
This curriculum runs everything at lab scale on a single Lima VM on your MacBook. That is not a production architecture. This is internal training material, not engineering or production guidance. Specific vNode feature support (deployment targets, kernel requirements, license entitlement) is governed by the official vNode documentation and your vCluster Labs contact, not by anything written here.
- Work modules in order. Each assumes the prior one's questions are answered.
- Read each module's Reading list and navigate the linked docs yourself. The briefs intentionally do not include copy-pasteable command walkthroughs.
- The durable artifact at every module is your written answers to the conceptual questions. Capture them wherever you keep notes — Notion, Obsidian, plain text, paper. The medium doesn't matter; the discipline of writing them does.
- Pace is yours. Advance when the module's success criteria are demonstrably met and you can articulate every conceptual question in writing.
- Mac with Lima installed (Apple Silicon supported; see notes in Module 0).
- Open
module-0-bootstrap.md. Each brief is self-contained: read it top to bottom, follow its reading list, write your answers wherever you keep notes.
Path: kernel/runtime primitives → vNode architecture → install contract → licensing surface → opt-in mechanism. Bottom-up by abstraction layer.
| # | Brief | One-line summary |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | module-0-bootstrap.md | Stand up Lima + kind + vNode locally. Disposable scaffolding setup. |
| 0.5 | module-0.5-primer.md | Linux namespaces, cgroups, container runtime stack, signal literacy. |
| 1 | module-1-architecture.md | The vNode runtime components and what each one substitutes or adds. |
| 2 | module-2-helm.md | The Helm chart as the install contract. Supported-environments boundary. |
| 3 | module-3-licensing.md | The two licensing modes as architectural surface. |
| 4 | module-4-runtimeclass.md | Selecting vNode for pods. Per-pod and per-Tenant-Cluster. |
This curriculum borrows directly from the vmetal training program's style. Three principles to internalize before you start:
-
Conceptual questions, not quizzes. Each module ends with questions you answer in writing. Each question has a lab checkpoint — a command or observation that confirms your mental model matches the live system. Wrong-but-runnable answers are caught by the system, not by an answer key.
-
Reading lists, not walked-through commands. The body of each module names the concept and points at authoritative documentation. You learn
kubectl describe podby reading kubernetes.io, not by copying it from this curriculum. The exception is genuinely undocumented vNode behavior, which the curriculum surfaces explicitly because there's nowhere else to read it. -
Disposable scaffolding. Lima, kind, the stub vCluster Platform — these are training devices. The contracts they expose (containerd CRI, OCI runtime spec, Redfish-style license validation) are the same as what you'll see in customer environments. Get the scaffolding working, then forget how. The contract is what transfers.
Bottom-up by abstraction layer: kernel primitives → runtime stack → vNode architecture → install/licensing → opt-in. By the time you finish M4, every layer vNode touches has been observed at least once in a live system.
All work happens inside one Lima VM running Ubuntu. No nested KVM on M-series — the VM uses host-CPU virtualization, but workloads inside containers run natively under Linux on the VM kernel. No issue for the architecture work. See module-0-bootstrap.md and bootstrap/ for the pinned template and resource floor.
.
├── README.md (this file)
├── module-0-bootstrap.md (each brief is one file at root)
├── module-0.5-primer.md
├── module-1-architecture.md
├── module-2-helm.md
├── module-3-licensing.md
├── module-4-runtimeclass.md
└── bootstrap/ (Module 0 pinned scaffolding)
Last Updated: 2026-05-08