Proposed: Evaluate Nutanix Community Edition and Harvester HCI for Development Infrastructure

The Context

The development team needs to evaluate hypervisor solutions for remote infrastructure management. Two primary options are being considered: Nutanix Community Edition (enterprise-grade with community licensing) and Harvester HCI (fully open-source hyperconverged infrastructure). Both should enable easy administration over the internet while maintaining portability to cloud-native deployments, with support for container deployment and cloud-init for development workflows.

The Problem Statement

Current infrastructure lacks a standardized hypervisor solution for development and testing environments that balances ease of remote administration with the requirement for portability and open-source alternatives.

Describe how your proposal will work with code, pseudo-code, mock-ups, or diagrams

Evaluate two hypervisor solutions for development infrastructure:

Option 1: Nutanix Community Edition

  • Install on bare metal or VMs (up to 4 nodes free)
  • Web-based management interface for remote administration
  • Built-in container and cloud-init support
  • Can run on developer laptops for local testing

Option 2: Harvester HCI

  • 100% open-source hyperconverged infrastructure solution
  • Built on Kubernetes, KubeVirt, and Longhorn
  • Modern HCI using enterprise-grade open-source technologies
  • Single pane of glass for virtualization and container management

Both options provide:

  • Remote administration capabilities over internet
  • Container workload support
  • Cloud-init integration for automated deployments
  • Portability to cloud-native architectures when scaling

Infrastructure Design:

Hypervisor Layer (Nutanix/Harvester)
    ↓
Container/Application Layer (K3s, Docker, etc.)
    ↓
Development Applications (V-Sekai, etc.)

The Benefits

  • Easy Remote Administration: Both solutions provide web-based interfaces for internet-accessible management
  • Container Support: Native support for containers and cloud-init simplifies deployment workflows
  • Laptop Development: Both can run on developer laptops or VMs for local testing environments
  • Cost Effective: Free community/open-source licensing for development use
  • Open Source Options: Harvester provides fully open-source alternative to Nutanix’s hybrid model
  • Cloud Portability: Applications remain deployable on cloud platforms without hypervisor dependencies
  • Modern Architecture: Built on proven open-source technologies (Linux, KVM, Kubernetes)

The Downsides

Nutanix Community Edition:

  • Not fully open source (built on proprietary enterprise software)
  • Vendor dependency concerns for enterprise software
  • Limited to 4 nodes in Community Edition
  • Potential future licensing changes

Harvester HCI:

  • Newer project compared to established enterprise solutions
  • May have fewer third-party integrations than mature platforms
  • Requires Kubernetes knowledge for advanced management
  • Community support vs enterprise backing

Both Options:

  • Learning curve for hypervisor management
  • Resource overhead compared to container-only solutions

The Road Not Taken

  • Proxmox Only: While viable, it lacks the integrated HCI features and container management capabilities of both Nutanix and Harvester
  • Cloud-Only Approach: Would sacrifice local development environments and easy remote administration capabilities
  • Custom Hypervisor Solution: Would require significant development effort for features already available in mature open-source solutions
  • Single Vendor Lock-in: Choosing only proprietary solutions without open-source alternatives

The Infrequent Use Case

  • Large-Scale Production: When infrastructure exceeds 4 nodes or requires enterprise support beyond Community Edition
  • Air-Gapped Environments: Where internet-based administration tools cannot be used
  • Minimal Resource Scenarios: Where hypervisor overhead is unacceptable for resource-constrained deployments

In Core and Done by Us

Infrastructure tooling decisions are core to development workflow efficiency. The development team will handle evaluation, documentation, and implementation of both primary and fallback hypervisor solutions.

Status

Status: Proposed

Decision Makers

  • V-Sekai Development Team
  • iFire
  • GPot

Tags

  • Infrastructure, Hypervisor, HCI, Nutanix, Harvester, Development, Containers, Cloud-Native, Open-Source

Further Reading

  1. Nutanix Community Edition
  2. Nutanix Community Edition Documentation
  3. Harvester HCI - Open-source hyperconverged infrastructure
  4. SUSE Harvester GitHub
  5. Nutanix Ansible Collection

Infrastructure Jargon

  1. Hypervisor: Software that creates and manages virtual machines, allowing multiple operating systems to run on a single physical machine.
  2. HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure): Integrates compute, storage, and networking into a single, software-defined platform.
  3. Cloud-Init: Multi-distribution package that handles early initialization of cloud instances, supporting configuration of hosts immediately after instantiation.
  4. Bare Metal: Running software directly on physical hardware without virtualization layer.

AI assistant Aria assisted with this article.