What is Harvester used for?

Harvester is an open-source hyperconverged infrastructure platform built on Kubernetes, combining virtual machines and distributed storage on bare-metal servers. It is a good fit for replacing legacy virtualization with Kubernetes-based HCI, running VMs and containers on one bare-metal cluster, and infrastructure at edge locations.

Is Harvester open source?

Yes. Harvester is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at harvester/harvester and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. Harvester is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Harvester?

Yes. Harvester can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What is Harvester an alternative to?

Harvester is an open-source alternative to Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, Nutanix and Google Compute Engine. Other open-source alternatives to Amazon EC2 include Apache CloudStack, LXD and Incus.

Is Harvester actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Harvester was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.9.0, published on 16 September 2026. The project has 5.2k stars on GitHub.

Harvester: open-source alternative to Amazon EC2

About Harvester

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.

Key features

Virtual machine lifecycle management
Live migration of VMs between hosts
VM backup, snapshot and restore
Distributed block storage with tiering
Virtual IP and multi-NIC networking
Bootable ISO or iPXE installation
Rancher integration for containers

Good fit for

→Replacing legacy virtualization with Kubernetes-based HCI
→Running VMs and containers on one bare-metal cluster
→Infrastructure at edge locations

Built with: Go; Kubernetes
Tags: hci; hyperconverged; kubernetes; virtualization; vm; storage; rancher; bare-metal; go

Harvester: questions and answers

What is Harvester used for?: Harvester is an open-source hyperconverged infrastructure platform built on Kubernetes, combining virtual machines and distributed storage on bare-metal servers. It is a good fit for replacing legacy virtualization with Kubernetes-based HCI, running VMs and containers on one bare-metal cluster, and infrastructure at edge locations.
Is Harvester open source?: Yes. Harvester is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at harvester/harvester and is written mainly in Go.
Is Harvester free?: Yes. Harvester is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Harvester?: Yes. Harvester can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What is Harvester an alternative to?: Harvester is an open-source alternative to Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, Nutanix and Google Compute Engine. Other open-source alternatives to Amazon EC2 include Apache CloudStack, LXD and Incus.
Is Harvester actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Harvester was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.9.0, published on 16 September 2026. The project has 5.2k stars on GitHub.