GNOME Boxes vs Harvester

GNOME Boxes is a free Linux desktop app for creating and managing local virtual machines, then installing an operating system in them. Its automatic installation list includes CentOS Stream, Debian, Fedora, Microsoft Windows, OpenSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu. Users can set memory and storage limits, save a VM state as a snapshot, and restore it later. Host integration includes shared clipboard, file drop, and shared folders; USB redirection makes devices plugged into the computer available inside a VM. Guest tools can improve input performance, screen resizing, clipboard sharing, and file transfer. Windows guests use spice-guest-tools, while Linux guests commonly use spice-vdagent. Boxes uses qemu-kvm, libvirt-glib, and spice-gtk to manage virtual machines. Three-dimensional acceleration is available for some supported systems. GNOME recommends processor virtualization extensions, at least 8 GB RAM, and 20 GB free disk space for efficient use. Boxes is for local VMs; GNOME points to Connections for remote machines and displays. The app is free and desktop-only.

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.