Lead Image © Lightwise, 123RF.com

Lead Image © Lightwise, 123RF.com

Manage VMs and Containers with Harvester

Data Farming

Article from ADMIN 94/2026
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Harvester builds a hyperconverged virtualization environment with Rancher Kubernetes, KubeVirt, and Longhorn to ensure that KubeVirt performs well, even in small and medium-sized infrastructures.

Broadcom's acquisition of VMware primarily resulted in significantly higher costs for vSphere customers, which explains why many vSphere users are looking for an alternative – such as KubeVirt [1], which joins forces with OpenShift or Rancher Prime to manage traditional virtual machines (VMs) and containers. Of course, this arrangement primarily happens in large-scale installations with dozens of nodes. Regular readers of ADMIN will have already discovered how KubeVirt works [2].

SUSE's Harvester [3] steps up to show that KubeVirt is also a great choice for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The software is open source and available free of charge on GitHub, and support is available for the commercial Harvester variant named SUSE Virtualization [4]. In this article, I take a close look at the tool and its features and offer tips for simplifying your work with Harvester and expanding its functionality. As a result, Harvester will run perfectly even in SMB environments.

Generous Hardware

The SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Micro distribution, a heavily pared-down version of SUSE Linux, runs on a physical Harvester node. SLE Micro is image-based and immutable, meaning the root filesystem is mounted read-only, and no changes can be made to the base system; not even the Zypper package manager will work here. When a new version of the operating system (OS) is available, Harvester replaces the node's entire image. Embedded within the OS image is the next-generation Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE2) distribution. All other functions run in Kubernetes pods.

The hardware requirements have changed slightly since 2024. Harvester now requires at least eight CPU cores and


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