is there a way to generate a disk image for harvester itself, say to boot in a virtual env or otherwise (dd to disk, basically)

I'm still coming to grips with this tool chain, but I suspect that you'd want the capabilities of #elemental to customize an OS for Harvester. My Harvester 1.1.1 is running SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro.

an unconfigured disk image that can be laid down and configured later (qcow2 file) of the existing install is what I'm looking for. following the PR now

yeah this PR might be the thing you are looking for, which introduces a brand new installation method of Harvester, which will shorten the installation time a lot since it's just dd-ing a image to disk if I'm reading this right

ya, that's the hope 😄