Good evening folks,
It's been a while since I have come around as things have went a bit crazy at work and a lot of shuffling at home too.
Anyhow, at work we run a Rancher Kubernetes cluster and I'm quite happy with it. So I give SUSE a big ovation for it and for it's longhorn storage as so far. It's been great. At home I used to run CentOS with a ton of memory and drives as my "converged" virtual server and NAS, but when a hard lightning strike laughed at my UPS and took down both. I ended up just picking up a QNAP device for my NAS that has light virtual services which was enough to run my Plex some other small services.
Anyhow, I decided that I want a home lab again so I converted my ham radio PC into and jammed a ton of memory and SSD disks in it and installed SUSE's Harvester platform which is basically an OS you install on hardware and it acts like say VMWare by doing both Virtual Machines (KVM) and Kubernetes (Rancher) in a single OS which is free.
I was crazy excited and installed it on my new home server to be my new home lab. Sadly, Harvester is not ready for prime time. Yes, it works and you can use it, but it needs some polish and some performance enhancements.
That said, I really like what SUSE is doing these days. I played around with them in the past, but my entire 25+ year career. I've been a Redhat / CentOS guy. With IBM purchasing Redhat and then attacking the foundations of what OSS is about. I've been on the fence about were to go. I'm down to moving to either AlmaLinux (maybe Rocky, but not sure yet) or trying to move to SUSE which makes my experience with Harvester not so pleasing.
That said, I haven't given up on SUSE. What they are doing for Linux right now is a big deal IMHO. I did install a new Linux over my Harvester install, but I did so for actually two reasons.
That said, I wanted to quickly go down my brief experience with Harvester for those that might be interested. Primarily, three points that led to me installing something else.
First Issue:
So, first things first. SUSE always used to annoy me due to a lack of polish in their installation software. Harvester's installer has issues. Basically, a normal install was impossible because during the cluster creation, you would get to the point of setting the IP address and a VLAN, except that it would immediately jump right back to "Create Cluster" that you already did losing everything you tried to set up.
How did I get past this? I had to use the "VGA Mode" install lol. After fighting with it a bit and a ton of searching Google, it seems the installation has issues with resolution. Using the VGA mode bypasses those issues allowing you to get Harvester installed!
Second Issues:
Making changes to virtual machines can sometimes be daunting. While in the end once I figured out what was going on and / or how to do it. I understood why I couldn't just make the chance, but dear god making the UI a tad more intuitive would be a big upgrade! Please, SUSE. Do this! Struggling to figure out non-intuitive software when you are working with things that can get complex is not a good deal.
Third Issue:
Harvester as a whole seems to be quite "heavy". By that I mean while I can run a Linux desktop in a VM among other things. Everything feels relatively sluggish. I'm sure as time goes, they will tighten this up and it will be far more zippy than it is today. Today it's not all that zippy. I even saw a few people reference this and I was hoping my six core processor and a $%^& ton of memory would make it bearable. Alas, I can better performance with just straight KVM.
That said, I will be keeping a close eye on Harvester. I think (and hope) it becomes a real player in the future.
For now, I'm going to go with SUSE and try to make it my distro of choice. If I am unable to come to terms with it. I suppose I will go to AlmaLinux or something similar, but my days with Redhat are over except in the cases where I have an application that requires a supported distribution that supports Redhat ABI. (ie, Redhat)
Dave
It's been a while since I have come around as things have went a bit crazy at work and a lot of shuffling at home too.
Anyhow, at work we run a Rancher Kubernetes cluster and I'm quite happy with it. So I give SUSE a big ovation for it and for it's longhorn storage as so far. It's been great. At home I used to run CentOS with a ton of memory and drives as my "converged" virtual server and NAS, but when a hard lightning strike laughed at my UPS and took down both. I ended up just picking up a QNAP device for my NAS that has light virtual services which was enough to run my Plex some other small services.
Anyhow, I decided that I want a home lab again so I converted my ham radio PC into and jammed a ton of memory and SSD disks in it and installed SUSE's Harvester platform which is basically an OS you install on hardware and it acts like say VMWare by doing both Virtual Machines (KVM) and Kubernetes (Rancher) in a single OS which is free.
I was crazy excited and installed it on my new home server to be my new home lab. Sadly, Harvester is not ready for prime time. Yes, it works and you can use it, but it needs some polish and some performance enhancements.
That said, I really like what SUSE is doing these days. I played around with them in the past, but my entire 25+ year career. I've been a Redhat / CentOS guy. With IBM purchasing Redhat and then attacking the foundations of what OSS is about. I've been on the fence about were to go. I'm down to moving to either AlmaLinux (maybe Rocky, but not sure yet) or trying to move to SUSE which makes my experience with Harvester not so pleasing.
That said, I haven't given up on SUSE. What they are doing for Linux right now is a big deal IMHO. I did install a new Linux over my Harvester install, but I did so for actually two reasons.
- Harvester has issues that it needs to work out.
- I really still need a desktop at my ham radio station.
That said, I wanted to quickly go down my brief experience with Harvester for those that might be interested. Primarily, three points that led to me installing something else.
First Issue:
So, first things first. SUSE always used to annoy me due to a lack of polish in their installation software. Harvester's installer has issues. Basically, a normal install was impossible because during the cluster creation, you would get to the point of setting the IP address and a VLAN, except that it would immediately jump right back to "Create Cluster" that you already did losing everything you tried to set up.
How did I get past this? I had to use the "VGA Mode" install lol. After fighting with it a bit and a ton of searching Google, it seems the installation has issues with resolution. Using the VGA mode bypasses those issues allowing you to get Harvester installed!
Second Issues:
Making changes to virtual machines can sometimes be daunting. While in the end once I figured out what was going on and / or how to do it. I understood why I couldn't just make the chance, but dear god making the UI a tad more intuitive would be a big upgrade! Please, SUSE. Do this! Struggling to figure out non-intuitive software when you are working with things that can get complex is not a good deal.
Third Issue:
Harvester as a whole seems to be quite "heavy". By that I mean while I can run a Linux desktop in a VM among other things. Everything feels relatively sluggish. I'm sure as time goes, they will tighten this up and it will be far more zippy than it is today. Today it's not all that zippy. I even saw a few people reference this and I was hoping my six core processor and a $%^& ton of memory would make it bearable. Alas, I can better performance with just straight KVM.
That said, I will be keeping a close eye on Harvester. I think (and hope) it becomes a real player in the future.
For now, I'm going to go with SUSE and try to make it my distro of choice. If I am unable to come to terms with it. I suppose I will go to AlmaLinux or something similar, but my days with Redhat are over except in the cases where I have an application that requires a supported distribution that supports Redhat ABI. (ie, Redhat)
Dave
