Hi all, I’ve started looking into harvester and rancher and have a general question regarding the infrastructure/architecture: Let’s say I have 10 baremetal server, would I run rancher on them, and then create VMs through harvester using the kubernetes resources? Or would I use harvester with the 10 baremetal nodes and then create VMs which run rancher and then integrate the foundational harvester into the upper layer rancher to manage both harvester and kubernetes through the rancher interface?

you can use harverster in all of them and run rancher on top then from rancher u can control/provision everything VMs / other rke2/k3s clusters which can have their own ranchers

High level. Install harvester on all 10 baremetal. Then, like vmware, create VMS. You can create VMS list Klesti said. There are some fun ways to use Rancher itself to manage the downstream clusters. What do you want to run on the VMs?

Highly depends on the use case, but if you're looking for a production environment I would recommend setting up rancher with at least 3 nodes for an HA setup running your engine of choice (maybe k3s) for the underlying cluster. Then the rest could be nodes registered to harvester, which you can use as an in-house cloud where you can spin up VMs and LBs on harvester through rancher. Having them run on separate baremetal / clusters eliminates a single point-of-failure, if say your harvester cluster went down, rancher would still be fine.

I’m trying to understand how I need to set up our infra when it comes to harvester and rancher. We have plans to move away from VMware and are exploring other hypervisors/hci solutions. We have a need for VMs as well as various kubernetes projects, ideally managed through a single point in some way, and since I saw harvester in rancher, I was wondering how these two play together. But I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it. Right now I think using the nodes as harvester resources to create VMs which then run rancher for kubernetes load is the cleanest way. If and how harvester can be managed through the rancher interface is something I need to PoC anyways.

1) are you willing to pay for rancher prime on cloud If this case just format 5 of them install harvester and migrate the vms form the other 5 to harvester then format those also 2) if you want to have everything in house Format 3 of them with suse micro (i use openSUSE microOS) Setup a rke2 cluster and install rancher on top Then format the rest with harvesters