Harvester vs IPFW

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.

IPFW has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.