Harvester Integrates with Rancher: What Does This Mean for You?

Thousands of new technology solutions are created each year, all designed to help serve the open source community of developers and engineers who build better applications. In 2014, Rancher was founded as a software solution aiming to help simplify the lives of engineers building applications in the new market of containers.

Today, Rancher is a market-leading, open source solution supported by a rich community helping thousands of global organizations deliver Kubernetes at scale.

Harvester is a new project from the SUSE Rancher team. It is a 100% open source, Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solution that offers the same expected integrations as traditional commercial solutions while also incorporating beneficial components of Kubernetes. Harvester is built on a foundation of cloud native technology to bridge the gap between traditional HCI and cloud native solutions.

Why Is This Significant? 

Harvester addresses the intersection of traditional HCI frameworks and modern containerization strategies. Developed by SUSE’s team of Rancher engineers, Harvester preserves the core values of Rancher. This includes enriching the open source community by creating Harvester as a 100% open, interoperable, and reliable HCI solution that fits any environment while retaining the traditional functions of HCI solutions. This helps users efficiently manage and operate their virtual machine workloads.

When Harvester is used with Rancher, it provides cloud native users with a holistic platform to manage new cloud native environments, including Kubernetes and containers alongside legacy Virtual Machine (VM) workloads. Rancher and Harvester together can help organizations modernize their IT environment by simplifying the operations and management of workloads across their infrastructure, reducing the amount of operational debt.

What Can We Expect in the Rancher & Harvester Integration?

There are a couple of significant updates in this v0.3.0 of Harvester with Rancher. The integration with Rancher v2.6.1 gives users extended usability across both platforms, including importing and managing multiple Harvester clusters using the Virtualization Management feature in Rancher v2.6.1. In addition, users can also leverage the authentication mechanisms and RBAC control for multi-tenancy support available in Rancher.  

Harvester users can now provision RKE & RKE2 clusters within Rancher v2.6.1 using the built-in Harvester Node Driver. Additionally, Harvester can now provide built-in Load Balancer support and raw cluster persistent storage support to guest Kubernetes clusters.  

Harvester remains on track to hit its general availability v1.0.0 release later this year.

Learn more about the Rancher and Harvester integration here.  

You can also check out additional feature releases in v0.3.0 of Harvester on GitHub or at harvesterhci.io.