The open source cowboys at Rancher Labs launched a new project called Harvester, an open source hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software built using Kubernetes. 

Even though Kubernetes as a stack has matured to be able to run production workloads at scale – and many organizations are doing that – virtual machine (VM) management in container platforms still requires users to have a commanding knowledge of container platforms. 

Sheng Liang, president of engineering and innovation at SUSE and co-founder and former CEO of Rancher Labs, said Harvester provides an open source alternative to commercial HCI software like VMware vSphere and Nutanix. It installs on bare metal server clusters and provides integrated virtualization and distributed storage capabilities in an easy-to-consume package.

“Despite the tremendous popularity of HCI, there is no popular open source HCI software yet,” said Liang. “Harvester aims to make HCI more widely accessible to the open source community."

Although the new project leverages Kubernetes, it does not expose Kubernetes concepts to users. Or as Liang put it: “Harvester focuses on the HCI users.”

Rancher Labs’ project Harvester is built on top of Kubernetes; KubeVirt, which enables Kubernetes to run and manage VMs; and Longhorn, a cloud-native container storage service that enables vendor-neutral persistent storage that supports stateful workloads on Kubernetes clusters. 

Liang said the new project has been “been purposefully designed to be easy to understand, install and operate.” To that extent, he explained, Harvester can be installed from ISO, and during installation, allows users to create a new cluster or add a current node into an existing cluster. Harvester will then automatically create a cluster based on the information provided. 

On the development side, Liang said the software can be installed as a helm chart on an existing Kubernetes cluster. This approach gives developers greater control over where workloads reside and enables workloads isolation to specific servers. 

It also supports management operations for VMs as well as secure shell (SSH) key injection and cloud-init. Harvester supports flexible networking configuration, including VLANs and provides enterprise-grade distributed block storage.

This announcement follows a November partnership in which NetApp struck a deal with Rancher to embed its Kubernetes management platform across its HCI in November. 

“SUSE, now with Rancher, will continue to partner with all existing storage and HCI vendors to offer a complete cloud-native technology stack to customers,” said Liang. “Harvester is one of many open source innovation initiatives inside SUSE. Even though it delivers some of the capabilities of commercial HCI products, with its vastly smaller feature set, Harvester does not attempt to compete with commercial HCI vendors. We believe Harvester will broaden the market interest in HCI among a new class of IT admins.”

There are a number of other platforms on the market that already integrate with projects like KubeVirt to enable managing VMs as containers, such as Platform9, for example. But Liang said this approach of managing VMs in container platforms requires substantial knowledge of Kubernetes. 

“Despite Kubernetes becoming an industry standard, knowledge of it is not widespread among VM administrators,” he added. “This is why we see Harvester as a particularly important project and why we are focused on making it easy to understand, install, and operate.”