Harvester (HCI)

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

On 1 December 2020, SUSE acquired Rancher Labs 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.

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 Computing or NVMe storage for IOPS sensitive use cases like databases.