Harvester
More info
- Creator
- SUSE / Rancher
- Released
- Type
- Hyperconverged infrastructure
- License
- Apache 2.0
SUSE's open hyperconverged infrastructure — virtual machines and containers on the same bare metal, built on Kubernetes.
Harvester is SUSE and Rancher's attempt to hand the virtualization world an open alternative to VMware. Its first stable release came in December 2021. Rather than a hypervisor stack of its own, Harvester builds on KubeVirt to run virtual machines as Kubernetes workloads, and on Longhorn for storage — all on top of a plain Kubernetes cluster running on bare metal.
The result is a platform where traditional virtual machines and modern containers live side by side and are managed from the same Rancher interface. The timing was no accident: when Broadcom bought VMware and raised prices, many went looking for exactly this kind of exit. Harvester is licensed under Apache 2.0, so the exit at least carries no license fee.