We’re excited to announce vCluster Platform v4.7 and vCluster v0.32, a release focused on resilience, troubleshooting, and day-2 operations for production virtual clusters.

From the new vCluster Debug Shell to improved observability guidance and a dedicated Virtual Cluster Status Page, these updates make it easier to diagnose issues, monitor health, and manage the full lifecycle of virtual clusters with confidence.

Debug Shell & More

The embedded etcd backing store is one of the cornerstones of production-ready virtual clusters. vCluster handles the full lifecycle of etcd as part of it’s control plane. In the last release we’ve added support for this feature to our free plan, for the whole community to benefit. To help you troubleshoot and identify misconfigurations early we’re introducing the vCluster Debug Shell. Attach an ephemeral debug container with helpful commands pre-wired right from the vCluster Platform UI or vCluster CLI and troubleshoot without leaving your browser and looking up which exact certificates etcdctl needs for the 10th time.

Alternatively use vcluster debug shell $VCLUSTER_NAME from the CLI.

Try it today by upgrading to vCluster Platform 4.7. Read more about it in the docs.

Virtual Cluster Status Page

Understanding the full lifecycle of any kubernetes cluster can sometimes be challenging. We’re excited to help you in understanding the phases a virtual kubernetes clusters through our dedicated status page in the vCluster Platform UI. See which phase your cluster is in at any point in time, together with all the pods that make up the control plane and conditions surfacing relevant and actionable information. The new status page will serve as the home page to your virtual clusters and we have big plans for it - stay tuned!

Breaking Changes

Migration of external platform configuration in vcluster.yaml

As functionality previously only available from the platform becomes widely available to virtual clusters launched and managed externally, we are updating the configuration to reflect that. This release restructures how platform-specific configuration is organized, relocating most items previously under the external.platform section to the top level:

• external.platform → platform

• external.platform.autoSnapshots → snapshots

• external.platform.autoDelete → deletion

Additionally, the top-level sleepMode configuration and external.platform.autoSleep have been merged into the unified sleep field. All sleep related settings, including auto sleep, auto wakeup, and timezone, are now consolidated under sleep. When both were previously configured, sleepMode took precedence, and the migration preserves this behavior.

• sleepMode.autoSleep & external.platform.autoSleep → sleep.auto

• sleepMode.autoWakeup → sleep.auto.wakeup

• sleepMode.timeZone & external.platform.autoSleep.timezone → sleep.auto.timezone

A migration helper is available inside the platform. However please note that as part of this change, previous migration logic built into the platform which assisted users moving from v0.24 to later versions have now been removed.

Ingress-Nginx Deprecation Update

As previously announced, the upstream ingress-nginx project has published plans for its retirement. While most of the functionality remains in the platform, it is marked as deprecated, and will be removed in a future release. In this release automatic ingress authentication has been removed, and we have stopped adding the following annotations by default to the optional platform ingress:

nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-read-timeout: "43200" nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-send-timeout: "43200" nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-body-size: "0" 

Other Announcements & Changes

• We’ve extended our support for the external database backing store. Now Postgres and MySQL are supported across all major cloud offerings and with a wider range of versions. Check out the full compatibility matrix for more details.

• We have added support for Kubernetes v1.35, enabling users to take advantage of the latest enhancements, security updates, and performance improvements in the upstream Kubernetes releases.

• We’re extending our existing monitoring docs to include guidance across all tenancy models. Virtual Clusters with private nodes and standalone require different approaches and are closer to your traditional kubernetes monitoring while maintaining the benefits and unique flexibility of vCluster. We will keep on working on the guides over the next couple of weeks, stay tuned!

For a list of additional fixes and smaller changes, please refer to the vCluster release notes and the vCluster Platform release notes. For detailed documentation and migration guides, visit vcluster.com/docs.