Harvester is a cloud native hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) open source software.

As of v0.3.0 rancher supports integration with harvester to provide a "single pane of glass" (central web GUI) to manage both your infrastructure and workloads.

Harvester is a type 1 hypervisor designed to be deployed on bare metal servers.

Harvester uses the Elemental Toolkit to create a minimal cloud-init version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro 5.3 to provide an immutable Linux distribution to remove as much OS maintenance as possible.

This is useful for passing a GPU for GPU-Accelerated Computing[6] or NVMe storage for IOPS sensitive use cases like databases.