Harvester vs Xen Orchestra
Harvester
harvesterhci.ioXen Orchestra
xen-orchestra.comSide by side
| Figure | Harvester | Xen Orchestra |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $83.33/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Server Virtualization Software | 8.1 (#6) | 7.6 (#9) |
| Deployment | Harvester installs directly on bare-metal servers from a bootable ISO; new installations starting with v1.8 require UEFI boot. | The Xen Orchestra Appliance is a pre-built virtual machine that is deployed on a host, while Xen Orchestra can also be installed from source. |
Plans
Xen Orchestra
- Pro$1,000 a year
- Enterprise$1,800 a year
- Essential$2,000 a year
- Essential +$4,000 a year
In their own words
Harvester
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.
Xen Orchestra
Xen Orchestra has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.