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# harvester
a
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f
Im in the same loop but plz check the thread above
n
Yeah, I did see that (before some of the replies). Honestly I am none the wiser though, failing to see the need for harvester over proxmox if I still need to run the cluster in VMs.
b
That's there you need to run VM's and create a cluster, you could technically use the k8s cluster on the host(I haven't had luck, the RBAC permissions were interferring) Initially even I was under the impression that both containers and vm's can be managed but it's not the case. Regardless it's useful in terms of Host management and adding nodes etc, but I haven't used it completely.
s
Down the same path single node harvester is probably overkill for a homelab. The convenience comes in mid the built in load balancing, vips, storage, etc, across multiple nodes
That being said I'm quite deep into using it at home and have been rather happy with it so far besides the overhead
Lack of rwx for guest clusters using harvester CSI is my biggest annoyance so far.
n
S
Ok great, as long as I know that is what I need to do (create VMs for the k8 cluster) then that is ok. I am currently using this for a home lab but would eventually like to use it for a small business/production deployment. So happy to have the overhead now if scalability works out a bit better etc. With that said, and this is the crux of it... Why should I use harvester over proxmox? The main selling point in my eyes was/is the kubernetes integration... But if I need to run rancher in a VM then I could do that in proxmox, and with less overhead and without needing to relearn a new hypervisor
Ah ok, so after doing a little more research am I right in thinking that the intention is to have two separate clusters, one for VMs and another for kubernetes? So ideally I should really have a rancher cluster/node already up and running to add a harvester cluster/node at which point you're able to manage VMs from the original rancher gui?
b
I think yea that's what one of my friends did they setup Rancher first, then harvester, it's still a lot of abstractions for me personally but i do wanna try it😅 In some posts I saw that people do the opposite harvester vms and rancher clusters
s
I've had rancher running on top of harvester and it works fine. Presumably they don't recommend it because you could shoot yourself in the foot if you break harvester underneath it.
As for why use harvester instead of proxmox, harvester seems built specifically to run k8s. The experience is a lot closer to using a cloud provider vs bare metal. There's a lot of conveniences
b
We have been pretty impressed with Harvester, and the access to the team, code, documentation, etc. Impressed enough where we are moving various vmware clusters to harvester, and are building most new environments on Harvester. With that said, it seems there is some confusion about Harvester rancher, etc. Rancher is not kubernetes, rancher is a kubernetes management environment more similar to the role of vmware vcenter, it is like the management brains, but is mutually exclusive, you odnlt have to run it but you can. They have also produced some very reliable and popular kubernetes versions like rke, rke2, k3s, that are easy to deploy using the rancher environment, but do not require it. Interesting fact if you dive a little deeper you will see that Harvester is actually built on RKE2, so you are already running a kubernetes environment underneath it all, including longhorn which is also kubernetes based. To that end, it may take a little getting to know kubernetes and kubectl, but the ability to manage, monitor, and heal the environment, because it is kubernetes, is very impressive.
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