Open-source Nutanix alternatives

Harvester is a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform built on Kubernetes. It runs on bare-metal servers and combines virtualization with distributed storage, giving operators a cloud-native alternative to traditional virtualization stacks that relies on direct-attached local storage instead of complex external SANs.

Harvester ships as a bootable appliance image that can be installed from an ISO or automatically through iPXE scripts. Virtual machines can be created, edited, cloned and deleted with SSH key injection, cloud-init and console access, moved between hosts with live migration, and backed up to NFS, S3 or NAS targets for later restore. Storage management covers distributed block storage and tiering, and networking supports virtual IPs and multiple network cards.

Because it uses the Kubernetes API as a common automation layer for container and VM workloads, and integrates with Rancher to support containerized environments, it can unify older virtualized infrastructure with container adoption from core to edge locations. Harvester is written in Go and licensed under Apache-2.0.

Apache CloudStack is open source software for deploying and managing large networks of virtual machines as a highly available, scalable infrastructure-as-a-service cloud. Service providers use it to offer public cloud services, while companies use it for private on-premises clouds or as part of a hybrid setup. It is written mainly in Java and Python.

The project describes it as a turnkey solution that includes the full stack most organizations want from an IaaS cloud: compute orchestration, network-as-a-service, user and account management, resource accounting, a complete native API and a user interface. Administrators can manage the cloud through a web interface, command-line tools or a query-based API.

CloudStack supports a range of hypervisors, including VMware vSphere, KVM, XenServer, XenProject and Hyper-V, as well as OVM and LXC containers. Topics also mention Kubernetes, XCP-ng and libvirt. It is an Apache Software Foundation project licensed under Apache-2.0, with documentation, a demo, news and events pages and security reporting procedures on its website.