SUSE Virtualization

SUSE Virtualization, formerly known as Harvester, is an open-source hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform built on Kubernetes. It comes from SUSE, which was founded in 1992 and is run from Nuremberg, Germany, with its corporate seat in Luxembourg; the majority owner is the Swedish investor EQT, which took the company private in 2023. SUSE Virtualization manages virtual machines and containers on the same cluster and plugs into Rancher.

Features

• Virtual machines on a Kubernetes-based platform, no separate hypervisor management stack
• Live migration, snapshots, backup and restore of virtual machines, built-in and third-party storage
• Rancher integration to manage SUSE Virtualization clusters and to provision guest Kubernetes clusters
• VM Migration Toolkit to move workloads over from VMware
• Commercial support through SUSE; the Harvester code base is open source

Fit and limits

SUSE Virtualization is the natural choice for teams that already run Kubernetes or Rancher and want VMs and containers under one roof. For a conventional vSphere replacement without Kubernetes know-how, Proxmox VE or XCP-ng are simpler to learn. Because EQT has been reported to explore a sale of SUSE, the ownership structure may change in future.