Rancher Harvester is an open source Hyper-Converged Infrastructure(HCI) solution based on Kubernetes.
Harvester makes it easy to get HCI up and running on the bare metal servers. Here are some notable features of the Harvester that currently provided:
- VM lifecycle management includes SSH-Key injection, Cloud-init and, graphic and serial port console
- Build-in storage management based on Longhorn
- Networking management with both overlay management networks and VLAN
- Build-in image repository
- Virtual Machine templates
To get the Harvester server up and running the following minimum hardware requirements are required:
| Type | Minimum Requirements |
|---|---|
| CPU | 4C is required, a minimum of 16C is preferred |
| Memory | 8G is required, a minimum of 32G is preferred |
| Disk | at least 120G is required, 500GB or above is preferred |
| Network Card | at least 1 Gigabit Ethernet port, for example, Ethernet 1GbE, RJ45 |
| Network Switch | Equipped with at least 1 Gigabit switch, 10 Gigabit switch is recommended(Will need to enabling trunking of port for VLAN support) |
Harvester supports two modes of installation:
In the Bare-metal mode, users can use the ISO to install Harvester directly on the bare-metal server to form a Harvester cluster. Users can add one or many compute nodes to join the existing cluster. A standalone Harvester node can still allow user to create and manage the virtual machines.
You can find the Harvester ISO image from the Github releases.
To find more detail about ISO installation, please refer to the ISO docs here.
In the App mode, the user can deploy Harvester using Helm to an existing Kubernetes cluster.
Note: Hardware-assisted virtualization must be supported on the Kubernetes nodes.
Please refer to the docs here.
Harvester is 100% open-source software. Project source code is spread across a number of repos:
| Name | Repo Address |
|---|---|
| Harvester UI | https://github.com/rancher/harvester-ui |
| Harvester Installer | https://github.com/rancher/harvester-installer |
| Harvester Network Controller | https://github.com/rancher/harvester-network-controller |
If you need any help with Harvester, please join us at either our Rancher forums or Slack where most of our team hangs out at.
If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to file an issue.
Copyright (c) 2020 Rancher Labs, Inc.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.