Harvester is now production-ready and generally available  

2021 has been a memorable year for the Harvester team. In May, SUSE hosted the first virtual SUSECON, where we announced the beta release of Harvester, alongside a cast of new innovative open source projects from the SUSE Rancher engineering team. In October, for the first time in two years, we were able to meet our industry peers and the community face-to-face at KubeCon North America where we announced Harvester’s plans to integrate with our leading Kubernetes management platform SUSE Rancher.

Today, we’re closing out the year with one more major announcement – that Harvester is now production-ready and generally available for our customers and the open source community! Harvester’s highly anticipated release marks a major milestone for SUSE as it is the first brand new product release since SUSE’s acquisition of Rancher Labs and expands SUSE’s portfolio capabilities into the hyperconverged infrastructure space.

Why did SUSE build an HCI product?

This year, SUSE made a commitment to our customers and the community to help them ‘Choose Open’ and innovate across their business using open source solutions. Harvester plays an integral piece in SUSE’s portfolio as it showcases our commitment in enriching the open source landscape while providing our customers and the community valuable solutions to help them solve their infrastructure challenges.

Harvester is a natural extension to our existing strong background in container management. It takes an open, interoperable approach to hyperconverged infrastructure and addresses common challenges, including managing sprawl, siloing of teams and resource limitations faced by IT operators who need to manage modern environments comprised of both virtualized and containerized workloads.

What’s Harvester?

Harvester is a 100% free-to-use, open source modern hyperconverged infrastructure solution that is built on a foundation of cloud native solutions including Kubernetes, Longhorn and Kubevirt. It has been designed as an enterprise-ready turnkey solution that gives operators a familiar operating experience like other proprietary HCI solutions in the market.

Though built on Kubernetes, it does not require any pre-existing knowledge to operate. Its integration with SUSE Rancher gives users the ability to operate their virtualized and container workloads all within the same platform while also creating an easy, low-risk pathway for organizations looking to adopt cloud native solutions into their infrastructure modernization strategy. Learn more about the technical capabilities of Harvester in this blog by Sheng Yang, Engineering Lead for Harvester.

Image 1. Harvester as part of SUSE Rancher Console

Harvester integrates with SUSE Rancher

With today’s GA, one of the biggest milestones the Harvester engineering team has achieved this year is the integration of Harvester into the SUSE Rancher console.

As organizations look to accelerate their IT modernization journey, complexity rapidly grows as teams adopt multiple different solutions to help them manage their ever-expanding environments.  Organizations now need tools that can help them both confidently scale environments that simultaneously efficiently manages and governs their stack. Harvester and SUSE Rancher together addresses these needs by consolidating the management of operations for virtualized and containerized workloads – all accessible in a single Rancher platform instance.

This means both Harvester and Rancher clusters can be managed side by side within Rancher’s instance, reducing operators’ need to use separate solutions between the two workloads. Users can access the Harvester UI directly from within the Rancher console. In addition, Harvester clusters also have the ability to access the same features available to Rancher clusters, including authentication, role-based access control and cluster provisioning.

Another opportunity with Harvester and Rancher is that organizations who may be early in their modernization journey can use both open source solutions together as a low-risk pathway to adopting cloud native technology across their stack. Both solutions promote innovation by encouraging organizations to build their confidence in integrating modern technology to develop cloud native applications. For extra piece of mind, customers who may need an additional helping hand can have access SUSE’s support subscription available for Harvester.

Harvester’s general availability extends further than its integration with SUSE Rancher and its ability to consolidate VM and container workloads. Learn more from Robert Sirchia, Senior Technical Evangelist at SUSE, as he explores how Harvester’s cloud-native lightweight nature can be applied at the edge and also used as a platform to modernize applications.

Don’t miss the SUSE and Rancher community’s Global Online Meetup introducing Harvester on the 19^th of January 2022 and 10am Pacific Time – alternatively find a local Harvester meetup near you. Learn more about Harvester here or get started today.