Rancher Suite K8S Adventure - Chapter 016 - Tour Harvester UI

Rancher Suite K8S Adventure - Chapter 016 - Tour Harvester UI

A travelogue of converting from OpenStack to Suse's Rancher Suite for K8S including RKE2, Harvester, kubectl, helm.

Today will be a quick tour of the Harvester v1.1.1 web UI.  Not a deep dive just some familiarization with the UI.

Note the console password is my admin password but that password is separate from the overall cluster password configured in the web UI.

To my modest annoyance, the web UI for Harvester is not compatible with the web browser on my Android phone, can't even get past initial login page, too much Javascript, probably.

Dashboard

"Dashboard" - Most of the time you just need to glance here.  For some odd reason the graphs started crashing almost immediately.

Hosts

"Hosts" - Reserved vs Used line graphs for CPU, memory and storage for each host in the cluster.  Can click thru to an individual host, and that is where you'd enable maint mode on one host or take a look at Ksmtuned statistics.  Note that you add additional disks for Longhorn storage in "Hosts" not "Volumes" just an interesting trivia point.

https://docs.harvesterhci.io/v1.1/host/

Virtual Machines

"Virtual Machines" - Note that you'll want to configure your SSH keys elsewhere before creating a VM.  Note that you create backups in "Virtual Machines", configure your S3 or NFS backup store in "Advanced" and examine actual backups in "Backup & Snapshot".

Volumes

"Volumes" - This is your window into Longhorn.  Note that you want to configure Storage Classes before configuring individual Volumes and SCs are configured in "Advanced" "Storage Classes".  Note that the default "harvester-longhorn" SC creates triple replicas which is rough on a three host machine.  You can't change the default SC its Helm managed, but you can clone and edit, although we're getting way off topic of a UI tour...

Images

"Images" - No images are loaded by default (kind of expected to see a SUSE here).  Here's a link explaining how to upload images.

https://docs.harvesterhci.io/v1.1/upload-image

Namespaces

"Namespaces" - Harvester doesn't really have docs for Namespaces, so here's a k8s link about namespaces in a generic sense:

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/working-with-objects/namespaces/

Networks

"Networks" - There's cluster networks:

https://docs.harvesterhci.io/v1.1/networking/clusternetwork

and there's VM networks:

https://docs.harvesterhci.io/v1.1/networking/harvester-network

We'll talk about that later in more detail.  It's a simplification, but you can pretty much put your stuff under the "mgmt" cluster network by creating an untagged VM network, especially if you only have one ethernet port and are not using VLANs.

Backup & Snapshot

"Backup & Snapshot" - actually has three components not two, VM backups, VM snapshots, and Volume snapshots.

VM backup and snapshot docs:

https://docs.harvesterhci.io/v1.1/vm/backup-restore

vs volume snapshot docs:

https://docs.harvesterhci.io/v1.1/volume/volume-snapshots

For people who've never used VMware or OpenStack or even LVM, a snapshot is a backup that hasn't been saved somewhere and its useful because you can restore it.  Or conceptually, a backup IS a snapshot its just that you're saving a copy of it somewhere off-disk for safekeeping.  Its interesting how the concept of backup fractured into those two terms maybe 20 years ago, you'd think this idea would go back much further but it does not and is pretty recent in the history of "making backups" which must go all the way back to unit record keeping equipment a century (or more) ago.

Monitoring & Logging

"Monitoring & Logging" - doesn't do much out of the box, we will return to this topic in more detail once we have something to monitor and record.

Monitoring reference docs:

https://docs.harvesterhci.io/v1.1/monitoring/

Logging reference docs:

https://docs.harvesterhci.io/v1.1/logging/

Advanced

"Advanced" - All kinds of stuff from above that would be considered "set it and forget it" or set it one time at initial setup, at least optimistically.

This completes a very fast tour of the Harvester UI