Harvester v1.4.x

IMPORTANT: Harvester only allows upgrades from supported versions. For more information about upgrade paths and procedures, see Upgrading Harvester.

Harvester supports upgrades from v1.3.2 to v1.4.0.

Product Lifecycle & Support Phases

All Harvester releases will go through three stages: In Development, Latest, and then finally Stable. Please ensure you do not upgrade your production cluster to anything other than a listed Stable version. Use Latest versions for test purposes only.

The current stable release is v1.4.0.

All versions listed below have an EOL date of 27 November 2025.

Release	Released
1.4.0	27 November 2024

Harvester follows an N -1 support policy (meaning that the 2 most recent minor versions receive security and bug fixes) along with a 26-week release cycle. This results in a release being supported for 14 months (12 months of support and 2 months of upgrade period).

PHASES	DESCRIPTION
GA to EOM	Upon General Availability of all major and minor releases, products are fully supported and maintained until the End of Maintenance date. Support entails general troubleshooting of a specific issue to isolate potential causes. Issue resolution is pursued through one or more of the following: Applying configuration changes. Upgrade recommendation to an existing newer version of product. Code-level maintenance in the form of product updates; typically, results in a maintenance release, which is a newer version of product that was not existing at the time the issue was encountered.
EOM to EOL	After a product release reaches its End of Maintenance date, no further code-level maintenance will be provided, except for critical security-related fixes on a request basis. Product will continue to be supported until it reaches End of Life, in the form of: General troubleshooting of a specific issue to isolate potential causes. Upgrade recommendation to an existing newer version of product - Issue resolution limited to applying configuration changes and/or an upgrade recommendation to an existing newer version of product.
EOL	Once a product release reaches its End of Life date, the customer may continue to use the product within the terms of product licensing agreement. - Support Plans from SUSE do not apply to product releases past their EOL date.

PHASES

DESCRIPTION

GA to EOM

Upon General Availability of all major and minor releases, products are fully supported and maintained until the End of Maintenance date. Support entails general troubleshooting of a specific issue to isolate potential causes. Issue resolution is pursued through one or more of the following:

Applying configuration changes.
Upgrade recommendation to an existing newer version of product.
Code-level maintenance in the form of product updates; typically, results in a maintenance release, which is a newer version of product that was not existing at the time the issue was encountered.

EOM to EOL

After a product release reaches its End of Maintenance date, no further code-level maintenance will be provided, except for critical security-related fixes on a request basis. Product will continue to be supported until it reaches End of Life, in the form of:

General troubleshooting of a specific issue to isolate potential causes.
Upgrade recommendation to an existing newer version of product - Issue resolution limited to applying configuration changes and/or an upgrade recommendation to an existing newer version of product.

EOL

Once a product release reaches its End of Life date, the customer may continue to use the product within the terms of product licensing agreement.

- Support Plans from SUSE do not apply to product releases past their EOL date.

Scope of Support

A Harvester support entitlement includes support for the components that are bundled with the Harvester appliance. Certain components such as Longhorn storage are subject to additional usage based entitlement, see SUSE T&C or speak to your Account Executive for details.

Hypervisor Host OS
Storage (Longhorn)
Harvester cloud provider (CCM) and storage interface (CSI)
Terraform provider
Windows VMDP Drivers

Support for guest Kubernetes distributions (e.g. RKE2, k3s) or Rancher Manager require a separate entitlement in addition to Harvester.

Harvester & Rancher Support Matrix

Rancher is an open-source multi-cluster management platform. Harvester has integrated Rancher by default starting with Rancher v2.6.1.

When upgrading Harvester, it is recommended to upgrade Rancher first. Rancher versions supported by the target Harvester version can be used in the upgrade path, even if they are not listed as supported for the current Harvester version.

Harvester Version	Rancher Version	Harvester Node Driver Supported K8S Versions
v1.4.0	v2.7.15, 2.7.16, 2.7.17, v2.8.8, v2.8.9, v2.9.2, v2.9.3	RKE1 & RKE2 v1.27, v1.28, v1.29, v1.30

Rancher Manager Supported Deployment

If a Harvester cluster requires Rancher Manager to be deployed on it, we support the following configuration:

3 node/VM RKE2 or k3s cluster
Installed using the Rancher Helm chart according to the Rancher Documentation
Single node Rancher managers are not supported

Harvester CCM & CSI Drivers

CCM and CSI drivers support RKE1, RKE2 and k3s distributions, unless otherwise noted.

For Harvester CCM and CSI driver integration with RKE1, please install or upgrade to the latest chart manually from the Catalog Apps. Refer to the Harvester doc here for more details.

Harvester Cloud Provider	Harvester CSI Driver	RKE2 Version	Feature Upgrade Support
v0.2.6	v0.1.21	>=v1.28.15+rke2r1	Yes
v0.2.4	v0.1.18	>=v1.27.16+rke2r2	Yes
v0.2.4	v0.1.17	>=v1.26.15+rke2r1	Yes
v0.2.3	v0.1.17	>=v1.26.6+rke2r1	Yes
v0.2.2	v0.1.16	>=v1.26.6+rke2r1	Yes
v0.2.2	v0.1.16	>=v1.25.11+rke2r1	Yes
v0.2.2	v0.1.16	>=v1.24.15+rke2r1	Yes
v0.1.14	v0.1.15	>=v1.23.17+rke2r1	No

Other Dependency Versions

Harvester Version	Harvester Terraform Provider
v1.4.0	v0.6.5

Guest Operating System Support

Full support for the following guest operating systems that have been validated to run in Harvester:

OS Family	Versions
SLES	15 SP6 15 SP4
OpenSUSE Leap	15.6
SLE Micro	6
Ubuntu	24.04
RHEL	9.4
Windows Server	2022
Windows (workstation)	11

All other x86 operating systems are supported on a "best effort" basis.

Hardware Requirements

For best results, SUSE recommends using YES certified for SLES 15 SP3 or SP4 Hardware with Harvester: https://www.suse.com/yessearch/. Harvester is built on SLE technology and YES certified hardware has additional validation of driver and system board compatibility.

To get the Harvester server up and running, the following minimum hardware is required:

Type	Requirements
Cluster	Minimum of 3 servers in each cluster
CPU	x86_64 only. Hardware-assisted virtualization is required. 8-core processor minimum for testing; 16-core or above is required
Memory	32 GB minimum, 64 GB or above required
Disk Capacity	200 GB minimum for testing (180 GB minimum when using multiple disks); 500 GB or above is required for production.
Disk Performance	5,000+ random IOPS per disk(SSD/NVMe). Management nodes (first 3 nodes) must be fast enough for Etcd. Only local disks or Hardware RAID is supported.
Network Card	1 Gbps Ethernet minimum for testing, 10Gbps Ethernet minimum required for production.
Network Switch	Trunking of ports required for VLAN support

Testing environments with 1 GB NIC / 140 GB disk are not supported