The Harvester Home Lab – VMs and Containers

I have a very soft spot in my heart for VMware. Pretty early on in my career when I was a System Administrator I got the opportunity to convert my companies physical infrastructure to a virtual infrastructure on VMware vSphere. The version of VMware we moved to, is not relevant to this discussion other than to show how truly old I am, and in order to save the parties involved some embarrassment we’ll ignore this implementation detail.

After this I went on to do consulting where I focused a good portion of my time on VMware vSphere, and later vRealize Automation related engagements. Eventually, I went on to work for VMware where I was focusing more on Kubernetes and Tanzu. VMware has almost been part of my career from the beginning and I’ve invested a lot of time into understanding the VMware technology stack.

In recent times though, I’m hearing of an increasing demand for alternatives. I’m not here to discuss why this is, or what I feel about it, just that I’m aware of it occurring around me. So this year I’ve updated my home lab to use Harvester, an open source virtualization management which not only allows me to run virtual machines but also containers. Time will tell whether or not this lab will be sufficient for my needs or if I’ll feel compelled to rebuild a VMware lab, but for now I’m getting out of my comfort zone and trying something new.

Follow Along

I’m setting up a Harvester lab for virtual machines and Rancher for Kubernetes all on the same hardware. If you’d like to learn more about this process, you can follow along with the deployment here:

• Install Harvester
• Create a Harvester virtual network
• Creating a Harvester virtual machine
• Add Kubernetes to the Harvester installation with Rancher
• Backup and Restore Harvester Virtual Machines
• Deploy Virtual Machine from Template
• Configure IPMI Integration for Power Management

The Hardware

My home lab hardware hasn’t really changed in recent years. I’m still running E200-8d Supermicro servers and I have five of them. Each of those servers have a 500 GB NVMe disk in them that I will later use for Virtual Machine disks. If you’re looking for these servers, they are the 5 small form factor servers on the right side of the second shelf. The giant servers on the bottom shelf are sadly unused and just taking up space these days.

I’ve also got two switches that I’m using but this isn’t necessary if you’re building a similar lab for Harvester. The HP switch is a layer 3 switch that I use for my router up to my Ubiquiti wireless network. The 10Gbps switch is used for my storage network. This used to be my vMotion / vSAN Storage network switch in the vSphere lab.

• Core Switch: HP v1910-24G Ethernet Switch
• Storage/vMotion Switch: Netgear XS708E 10 Gigabit
  • That switch was a gift from fellow vExpert Jason Langer https://theithollow.com/2016/12/19/unbelievable-gift-home-lab/

The cables are colored according to purpose.

• Yellow – Management Networks and Out of Band access.
• Green – Storage and vMotion Networks (10GbE)
• Blue – Trunk ports for virtual machines
• Red – Uplinks

Architecture

One of the main things that piqued my curiosity about Harvester was that it ran on the Kubevirt project. Kubevirt is a way to run virtual machines in a container where we can manage it with Kubernetes. Its pretty handy to be able to deploy virtual machines in my home lab, and have Kubernetes all running on the bare metal.

Here is my architecture. It’s not a typo, node02 does not have an NVMe disk in it. There was an an issue and I never got it replaced so its missing for now. I have four nodes in my Harvester cluster, and I have a 5th server I’m using as a management machine with docker installed. This is where I’ll deploy docker (not a production recommendation). I have a mgmt vlan where I deploy the Harvester hosts, and I’ve setup a VM network connection as well and plumbed it down to my hosts.

Summary

It’ll be weird not having a VMware lab in my basement this year, but if the rest of the industry is starting to look around at alternatives, I suppose I should adapt as well and see what else is out there. Perhaps there will be more posts in this series if this lab works out for me.