I saw the announcement yesterday and am very excited to try this in my homelab. Just like the blog post says, I have a lot of knowledge with vmware and I have a very difficult time grasping the world of containers. So this product sounds perfect for me. I have a Dell R720 running ESXI using a USB stick as the boot drive. My question is can I run Harvester off of a USB stick as well and will it detect the raid drives that already exist on that server? If so what would be the recommended capacity for the USB?
My (very early) opinion is that right now it cant be installed on USB, if you look inside Harvester you will see k3sOS, searching in the installation instructions there is no mention of support for USB as destination media for the install. One of the advantages o ESXi is the support to be run from USB, since ESXi load almost everything to RAM, there isn’t going to kill the USB anytime soon.
I also use VMware products a lot and right now Harvester is in a very early stage, to test it out I’m running it on Nested VMs (passing the virtualization flags to the VMs), let’s hope for fast development and more stable releases soon.
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So I can confirm you can boot harvester from a flash drive. I burned the installer to a flash drive, booted it on the dell server and ran the installer with a second flash drive as the source. Its now up and running. What I am trying to figure out now is how to add the raid disk in the server as volumes. Right now the only available storage is the flash drive its running on.
I will be attempting this later as well as I recently purchased a pack of 32GB USB drives to be used for Nutanix, only to find Nutanix no longer supports USB install and has much higher system requirements than I want to put in for a home lab. My question for you is two fold. One, what size USB drive did you use for the installation? Two, are you able to check the health of your USB drive or determine frequency of writes? That is the biggest issue of having a linux OS install on a USB thumbdrive is the life expectency of the drive is severely degraded.
It will be writing constantly! Longhorn will wear our your usb pretty quickly I’m sure. As of now there is no support for volumes, however k30s does come compliled with a lot of file system tools including support for lvm.
And you can run
kubectl patch svc longhorn-frontend -p '{"spec": {"ports": [{"port":80, "targetPort":"http", "name":"http", "nodePort":30445}],"type": "NodePort"}}' -n longhorn-system
and access longhorn ui on port 30445 and add the disks after you’ve formatted and mounted them.
Note that won’t save your usb drives. Currently the root filesystem is being used for everything. Usb will not last very long.