Harvester (HCI)

Harvester is a cloud native hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) open source software. Harvester was announced in 2020 by SUSE.[1][2][3]

On 1 December 2020, SUSE acquired Rancher Labs[4] who makes a product called Rancher that manages kubernetes clusters. As of v0.3.0 rancher supports integration with harvester to provide a "single pane of glass" (central web GUI) to manage both your infrastructure and workloads.

Harvester Overview

Bare Metal

Harvester is a type 1 hypervisor designed to be deployed on bare metal servers. It can be manually installed using a ISO disk or USB install, or installed over the network via a PXE Boot server such as IPXE

OS

Harvester uses the Elemental Toolkit to create a minimal cloud-init version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro 5.3 to provide an immutable linux distribution to remove as much OS maintenance as possible.

Virtualization

Kubevirt is used on top of kubernetes to provide virtualization support. This allows harvester to run virtual machines as a kubernetes workload. Harvester provides most basic features provided by other hypervisors such as ESXI, Proxmox VE and XCP-NG / Citrix XenServer. As of v1.1.0 PCI Device passing is supported as an experimental feature, allowing PCI devices on the hypervisor host to be passed directly to a VM. Devices not in use directly by the hypervisor can be used. This is useful for passing a GPU for gpu accelerated workloads[5] or NVMe storage for IOPS sensitive use cases like databases.

See also

References
  1. December 16, 2020, suse.com: Announcing Harvester: Open Source Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Software, backup
  2. 9 Jul 2022, theregister.com: Broadcom's VMware buy got you worried? Give these 5 FOSS hypervisors a spin. These suggestions are like our principles. If you don't like 'em ... we have others Quote: "...A relative newcomer to the virtualization game, SUSE is best known for its enterprise Linux operating system. However, the company recently launched its open source Harvester hyperconverged infrastructure platform...Harvester is based on Linux and uses the Kubernetes Kubevirt virtualization stack as opposed to KVM or Xen, and the storage system is built on top of the Longhorn block-storage framework...Harvester is offered at no cost under an Apache 2.0 license. For users that want or need additional support, SUSE does offer a subscription support service, but doesn't publicly disclose pricing...", backup
  3. Oct. 12, 2021, zdnet.com: SUSE Harvester: Deploying virtual machines with Kubernetes Quote: "...For those of you who haven't met it yet, Harvester is a modern Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution. It's built for bare metal servers using enterprise-grade open source technologies including Kubernetes; Kubevirt, a virtualization Application Programming Interface (API) for Kubernetes; and Longhorn, distributed block storage for Kubernetes...", backup
  4. "SUSE completes Rancher Labs acquisition". Suse.com. Dec 1, 2020.
  5. Rouse, Margaret (2022-06-28). "GPU-Accelerated Computing".
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