DataCore SANsymphony vs Harvester

DataCore SANsymphony is self-hosted, block-based software-defined storage for SAN and hyperconverged environments. It pools storage from different hardware and centrally manages capacity provisioning and data placement. Performance tools include RAM caching, parallel I/O processing, auto-tiering, and load balancing. Recovery and availability features include synchronous mirroring, asynchronous replication with failover and failback, snapshots, and continuous data protection. It lists NVMe, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and SAS/SATA protocols; NFS and SMB access is supported through Windows File Server. Administrators can use a console, REST API, PowerShell API, plug-ins, provisioning and orchestration, and real-time or historical charts. Data services include encryption and immutability, and backup-tool integration is supported. Deployment options include storage virtualization, converged, hyperconverged, and hybrid-converged configurations. Four editions address high-performance, midrange, smaller high-availability, and backup or replication needs. Pricing is on request; there is no free plan, though a trial is available. Server installations require Windows Server 2016 through 2025, with a documented minimum of 8 GB RAM and 20 GB local disk space.

Harvester is free, open-source hyperconverged infrastructure for bare-metal servers, combining virtualization and distributed storage. It is intended for VMs, Kubernetes running in VMs, containerized workloads on bare metal, and edge workloads. Its architecture uses Kubernetes, KubeVirt, Longhorn, Grafana, Prometheus, and SUSE Linux Micro. Users can create, edit, clone, and delete VMs, with SSH key injection, cloud-init, and graphical or serial consoles. Live migration moves a VM to another host without downtime, but requires matching physical CPU specifications. Storage includes distributed block storage and tiering; VM backups use NFS or S3-compatible targets and are limited to Longhorn volumes. Harvester installs directly on bare metal from a bootable ISO; new installations starting with v1.8 require UEFI boot. Three nodes are needed for multi-node features and high availability, while production recommendations call for at least 16 CPU cores, 64 GB memory, 500 GB disk, and 10 Gbps Ethernet. Laptops and nested virtualization are unsupported.