Quick look into SUSE Harvester
Daniel Nashed 30 March 2024 10:57:34
Now that admins are looking for alternate solutions, I took a quick look at SUSE Harvester.
A new Kubernetes based platform which leverages Linux native kernel virtualization (KVM) to run VMs in a cluster.
Harvester is "Cloud-Native Hyperconverged Infrastructure" available for free.
"Designed to help operators consolidate and simplify their virtual machine workloads alongside Kubernetes clusters, Harvester is the next generation of open-source hyperconverged infrastructure solution designed for modern cloud-native environments."
For details see https://www.suse.com/products/harvester/
Multiple admins pointed me to this solution in my blog and Discord. So I had a quick look.
The installation is a piece of cake -- if you have sufficient resources.
Minimum system requirements
The minimum requirements are 32 GB RAM, 8 CPU cores and 250 GB disk -- and they really mean it!
I set it up on my Proxmox host with 4 CPU cores and 20 GB RAM.
RAM wasn't an issue, but already in idle without any VMs running my CPUs are 40% busy!
Most RAM was still used for file system cache. So there wasn't a high use by Harvester.
But the Kubernetes back end needed quite some CPU resources.
This isn't new to me. Other platforms like Redhat OpenShift have similar behavior.
The management of the environment for flexibility, scaling and high availability in a cluster, has it's costs.
And this wasn't even a cluster with multiple hosts..
Setting it up and managing VMs
Installation was fully automatic and after a while and some 100% CPU load of my 4 CPU cores, I had my SUSE Havester server.
The interface really reminds we on the Rancher server -- which isn't a coincident nor surprise.
I just installed a mini VM using Alpine Linux as you can see below.
The whole experiment took me just an hour end to end. So getting it up and using it is quite simple.
Conclusion
SUSE Harvester really looks like a solid product, which might be a good option for the enterprise business.
But it's not a platform I want to run at home in my environment.
Other platforms like Proxmox are much more resource efficient and provide a lot more VM capabilities.
I don't see that this can replace ESXi installations at home.
My new favorite platform at home is and stays Proxmox.
Harverster VM's console
Harvester Web interface
The web interface pretty much looks like the Rancher interface.
Havester CPU load on my Proxmox server
You can see that I got round 40% of CPU load on my 4 CPU cores even in idle.
There was nothing else running on the Proxmox host at the same time.
And you can see when I stopped the Harvester VM, the CPU dropped.
Havester VM Top
A quick look into top on the Harvester host shows what keeps it busy.
Alpine VM Top
Top in the Alpine Linux VM shows almost zero load.
So the VM isn't keeping the machine busy at all.
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