I've been playing with Harvester a bit on my home lab this weekend, and I have some questions based on that experience that I was hoping someone could help with:
• Since I'm in a home lab the servers aren't SUPER beefy, but it seems like harvester has 50% of my 32 cores reserved without even running anything else. Is that expected? That seems really high. Is it not really worth running Harvester on lower-specced machines? I also have 14 of my 93GiB reserved (15%), but that at least leaves a lot more headroom.
• I'm planning to run Rancher to manage the Harvester cluster, as well as my DO Kubernetes cluster, and it seems like there's at least some version of Rancher running "behind the scenes" of Harvester. Do I need to also create another set of VMs on the Harvester cluster to install Rancher on those as well? Is that a common pattern (managing the Harvester cluster Rancher is running on via the same Rancher)? It seems wasteful to run Rancher in order to run another Rancher.
• Longhorn is running on the Harvester cluster, and I was planning to run Longhorn already myself. Is it typical for people to expand Harvester's Longhorn with more storage and use that same Longhorn cluster as a target from a Kubernetes cluster that's running in Harvester VMs? Should I instead be running another Longhorn cluster inside Harvester VMs to be the "Guest Longhorn"? If I were to set up a separate Longhorn cluster (say, bare metal or something) would I be able to use that for Harvester?
• Is there any way for me to easily verify Harvester is using the correct NICs for its storage network? I was looking at the IPs to see if it was using the CIDR I provided, but it looks like it's using overlay network IPs?
• I'm a big fan of config management and versioned config files for everything (I tend to forget how I set something up so having configs to redo it is great), can I use that with Harvester (and I guess by extension Rancher)? Can I write YAML manifests to define all the VMs/volumes/images/networks/etc and apply those to the cluster to be able to bring up any other Harvester cluster to the same state as another (assuming the same hardware)? I had to dig into the internals a bit in order to troubleshoot some of my Longhorn/Harvester issues when one of my nodes flaked out and it was nice to see Kubernetes "under the hood", but can I also use that and apply CRDs directly to the management cluster (possibly via CI/CD)?
Thanks for any help/insight you can give! 😄