SUSE Harvester and Rancher Solutions on ThinkSystem V3 Servers

Lenovo ThinkSystem V3 systems are the perfect choice for hyperconverged infrastructure and provide an outstanding platform to support the different workloads. Lenovo ThinkSystem V3 servers are equipped with 5^th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and 5^th Gen AMD EPYC processors.

SUSE Rancher is a Kubernetes management platform which provides a single-pane-of-glass approach for provisioning, upgrading, securing, and monitoring Kubernetes clusters across on-premises and in the cloud infrastructure. Rancher is integrated with Rancher Kubernetes Engine Government (RKE2) distribution which uses containerd as an embedded container runtime.

SUSE Harvester is an open source hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution designed for modern cloud native environments and it uses RKE2 as a container orchestrator on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and KubeVirt technology to provide virtualization and Longhorn for distributed block storage. This architecture helps operators consolidate and simplify to run their virtual machine workloads alongside containerized workloads using Kubernetes control plane. Storage is distributed along the Harvester nodes and Longhorn scales easily with the rest of the cluster as new nodes are added and supports backups to NFS or S3 buckets.

Harvester is fully integrated with Rancher and leverages it for authentication, authorization, and cluster management and can be managed and monitored from Rancher console. This integration unifies management across multiple clusters and environments, simplifying operations, improving governance, and enhancing overall visibility and control. The hyperconverged infrastructure designed with Lenovo ThinkSystem Servers and SUSE Harvester eases and scales deployment and operations. With Rancher Prime and Harvester, IT operators now have access to an enterprise-ready, simple-to-use infrastructure platform that cohesively manages their virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters alongside one another.

Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 V3 (2U) and SR630 V3(1U) systems are equipped with 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. The 5^th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors support up to 64 cores, up to 3.9 GHz clock speed, up to 8 TB memory and support PCIe 5.0 and NVMe drives.

Lenovo ThinkSystem SR635 V3 (1U 1P), SR645 V3 (1U, 2P), SR655 V3 (2U, 1P) and SR665 V3 (2U, 2P) systems are featured with 5th generation AMD EPYC™ processors. The AMD EPYC 9005 family of processors offer up to 160 cores, up to 4.0 GHz clock speed, up to 3TB memory, and support PCIe 5.0 and NVMe drives.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is certified and supported on ThinkSystem V3 servers.

Applications where the servers would excel include:

• Mission Critical applications

• ERP

• CRM

• Business Intelligence (BI)

• Databases and Data Warehouse

• Analytics

• Virtual Desktops

• High Performance Computing (HPC)

• Artificial Intelligence

• Server Consolidation

• Virtualization

Longhorn is a thin-provisioned crash-consistent block storage system, and it has two components.

The Longhorn Manager Pod runs on each node in the Longhorn cluster as a Kubernetes DaemonSet. It is responsible for creating and managing volumes in the Kubernetes cluster, and handles the API calls from the UI or the volume plugins for Kubernetes.

The Longhorn Engine is a dedicated storage controller for volume created through Longhorn Manager. It creates replicas distributed across hosts in the cluster to ensure maximum availability. The multiple data paths of the replicas ensure high availability of the Longhorn volume. The Longhorn Engine always runs in the same node as the Pod that uses the Longhorn volume.

Figure 1. The Longhorn Engine

Harvester can start in a single node (also known as all-in-one), where the node serves as a compute and a single node control plane. Longhorn is deployed as part of Harvester, provides the storage layer. When the cluster reaches three nodes, Harvester will reconfigure itself to provide High Availability features without disruption. Harvester only supports VLAN through bridges and NIC bounding.

Figure 2. Harvester Architecture

Figure 3 below shows multi-cluster registration option in Harvester management console.

Figure 3. Harvester Management Console

Figure 4 below shows Rancher dashboard with Harvester cluster management.

Figure 4. Rancher Dashboard

Rancher Server includes all the software components used to manage the entire Rancher deployment. For the best performance and security, we recommend a dedicated Kubernetes cluster for the Rancher management server. Rancher can run on a single node, or on a high-availability Kubernetes cluster and A high-availability Kubernetes installation is recommended for production.

The Rancher server, regardless of the installation method, should always run on nodes that are separate from the downstream user clusters that it manages. If Rancher is installed on a high-availability Kubernetes cluster, it should run on a separate cluster from the cluster(s) it manages.

A user cluster is a downstream Kubernetes cluster that runs your apps and services. Figure 5 below depicts two downstream user clusters are managed by Rancher management server.

Figure 5. Rancher Management Server