SUSE a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Server Virtualization Platforms

We’re excited to share that SUSE has been recognized as a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Server Virtualization Platforms. To us, this recognition reflects a strategy built entirely around you. Virtualization is not a separate product at SUSE. It is part of one open platform, so the VMs you run today and the containers you are moving to live in the same place, under the same control.

Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms

Virtualization Stopped Being a Line Item

For years the hypervisor renewal was a maintenance decision. Sign, budget, move on. That is over. Renewal costs climb on software you do not control, the roadmap belongs to someone else, and the modernization plan keeps slipping because the platform underneath it cannot go anywhere.

SUSE Virtualization takes a different approach. It is a KVM-based platform built on Kubernetes, integrating SUSE Storage, the SUSE Rancher Prime management platform, RKE2 and KubeVirt. VMs run inside the same control plane as containers rather than beside it, on a turnkey bare-metal appliance with pricing you can predict. The estate you have and the estate you are building sit on one platform.

Real Customer Impact: Economics, Sovereignty, and Scale

Our core philosophy is simple. You should not have to buy a second platform to modernize the first one. Customers are already running that way:

• Thales Alenia Space: Runs virtualization at up to three times lower cost than its previous platform, with provisioning more than 90% faster, across 14 sites in Europe and 7 countries.
• FIS-ASP: Rebuilding 1,000 SAP systems on sovereign German infrastructure certified to ISO 27001 and NIS2, avoiding a renewal that would have more than doubled its cost.
• CSCS: Runs roughly 500 nodes with a team of two engineers, cutting time spent on infrastructure management by around 80% and speeding deployments by around 70%.
• Aussie Broadband: Cut cluster provisioning from two days to one or two hours and gained 20 to 30% in day to day operational efficiency across a network carrying 780,000 broadband connections.
  

One Platform for the VMs You Have and the Ones You Are Building

The platform moved a long way this past year. External SAN and NAS storage support. VM Auto-Balance to rebalance workloads across clusters. ARM generally available. MIG-backed GPU devices. A migration toolkit that carries existing VMs across and installs the guest tools for you. Whether you are consolidating a data center, standing up a private cloud, or planning the move to containers, SUSE puts you in control:

• VMs and Containers, One Control Plane: Virtualization is integrated directly into the Kubernetes control plane, so VMs and containers are provisioned, governed, audited, and role-controlled through the same interface, on x86 and now generally available on ARM.
• Compute and Storage Built for Production: Large virtual machine sizes, CPU oversubscription controls, resource guarantees, vNUMA exposure, and hot-plugging. Broad enterprise storage protocol support with extensive CSI integrations to external storage, alongside SUSE Storage for software-defined deployments, and an extensive certified hardware program.
• Security and Compliance You Can Evidence: Role-based access control, multifactor authentication, TPM and vTPM, VM encryption, FIPS-compliant deployment options, and documented hardening guidance for secure deployments.
• Backup That Works With What You Already Run: Native per-VM backup and restore with scheduling, retention, and cross-cluster restore, plus documented support from data protection partners for broader recovery workflows. [OPTIONAL, PENDING ALLIANCES SIGN-OFF: name the partners here.]
• Sovereignty by Construction: European headquarters, fully open source and auditable code, air-gapped operation with no external cloud dependency, and verified software with signed artifacts and SBOMs through the SUSE Application Collection.

We build virtualization inside a cloud native platform on purpose. Swapping one hypervisor for another solves this year’s renewal. A platform that runs your VMs today and your containers tomorrow solves the decade. That is the bet we made, and it is why VMs run inside the Kubernetes control plane instead of alongside it.

We feel being recognized as a Visionary reflects our ongoing commitment to building one platform that carries the workloads you have into the ones you are building

Next Steps:

• Read the full 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Report
• Explore SUSE Virtualization
• Explore the SUSE Rancher Prime Portfolio
• Get in touch with our team

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms, Tony Harvey, Daniel Bowers, Paul Delory, Tony Iams, Owen Marino, 14 September 2026

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This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from SUSE-US.