Harvester v1.5.x

Harvester is adopting a new lifecycle strategy that simplifies version management and upgrades. This strategy includes the following:

• Four-month minor release cadence
• Two-month patch release cadence (best effort)
• Component adoption policy

The following table outlines the supported upgrade paths. For more information about upgrades, see the documentation. Before upgrading Harvester v1.5, you must first upgrade Rancher to a supported patch version of Rancher v2.11. The table below shows the correct upgrade path.

Installed Version	Supported Upgrade Versions	Rancher Version Before Harvester Upgrade
v1.4.2	v1.5	v2.11
v1.4.3	v1.5	v2.11
v1.5.x	v1.5.y (where y is greater than x)	v2.11

Product Lifecycle & Support Phases

In earlier versions, the terms Latest and Stable were used to provide guidance for upgrades. Starting with v1.5, the terms Community and Prime are used to differentiate the releases intended for community users and SUSE customers.

NOTE: "Prime" refers to SUSE Rancher Prime, which is SUSE's enterprise container management platform. SUSE Virtualization is the cloud-native virtualization product that is part of SUSE Rancher Prime.

The listed versions all have an EOM date of 30 December 2025 and an EOL date of 30 December 2026.

Scope of Support

A Harvester support entitlement includes support for the components that are bundled with the Harvester appliance. Certain components such as Longhorn storage are subject to additional usage based entitlement, see SUSE T&C or speak to your Account Executive for details. 

• Hypervisor Host OS
• Storage (Longhorn)
• Harvester cloud provider (CCM) and storage interface (CSI) 
• Terraform provider
• Windows VMDP Drivers

Support for guest Kubernetes distributions (e.g. RKE2, k3s) or Rancher Manager require a separate entitlement in addition to Harvester. 

Harvester & Rancher Support Matrix

Rancher is an open-source multi-cluster management platform. Harvester has integrated Rancher by default starting with Rancher v2.6.1.

Rancher Manager Supported Deployment

If a Harvester cluster requires Rancher Manager to be deployed on it, we support the following configuration: 

• 3 node/VM RKE2 or k3s cluster
• Installed using the Rancher Helm chart according to the Rancher Documentation
• Single node Rancher managers are not supported

Harvester CCM & CSI Drivers

CCM and CSI drivers support RKE1, RKE2 and k3s distributions, unless otherwise noted.

For Harvester CCM and CSI driver integration with RKE1, please install or upgrade to the latest chart manually from the Catalog Apps. Refer to the Harvester doc here for more details.

Other Dependency Versions

Guest Operating System Support

The following guest operating systems have been validated to run on SUSE Virtualization during release testing:

A broad range of operating systems should function well in virtual machines on SUSE Virtualization. SUSE Virtualization supports x86_64 and ARM64 physical host servers, and each can run guest operating systems for their respective architecture. Generally, older versions of those operating systems will continue to function, even if they have not been validated during the latest release testing. Any known issues with guest operating systems will be provided in the release notes.
 

Hardware Requirements

For best results, SUSE recommends using YES certified for SLES 15 SP3 or SP4 Hardware with Harvester: https://www.suse.com/yessearch/. Harvester is built on SLE technology and YES certified hardware has additional validation of driver and system board compatibility. 

To get the Harvester server up and running, the following minimum hardware is required:

Testing environments with 1 GB NIC / 140 GB disk are not supported

We recommend server-class hardware for the best results. Laptops and nested virtualization are not commercially supported.