How Harvester Government is Replacing Legacy Infrastructure

From IC Insider Rancher Government Solutions

The Broadcom acquisition of VMware has sent shockwaves through the Federal IT ecosystem. With pricing increasing significantly and licensing uncertainty becoming the new normal, many government agencies are asking for a better way to modernize infrastructure.

The Legacy Infrastructure Dilemma

Traditional infrastructure solutions like VMware’s vSphere have been the backbone of government IT operations for decades. But today, they’re quickly becoming bottlenecks for agencies and organizations trying to stay responsive.

Think about the compounding challenges your teams face daily:

Costs are skyrocketing. You’re burdened with increasing licensing fees and maintenance overhead for outdated systems, draining budgets that could fund innovation. With Broadcom’s acquisition, these uncertainties have only multiplied.

Legacy systems have become too complex to update and maintain. Your teams spend too many hours on manual processes prone to errors rather than focusing on mission-critical initiatives.

Flexibility is nonexistent. These siloed systems are often incompatible with newer technologies, making integration difficult and time consuming. Scaling quickly for a mission-critical operation without significant disruption and capital investment is virtually impossible.

Security compliance gaps are widening. As standards become more stringent, legacy systems often can’t keep pace with security updates fast enough to address new vulnerabilities and put critical data at risk.

And then there’s the vendor lock-in. You’re essentially held hostage to proprietary technologies, losing control over your own infrastructure and forced into costly upgrades on someone else’s timeline.

Infrastructure Freedom Reimagined

Rancher Government Solutions (RGS) offers a modern alternative to legacy infrastructure through Harvester Government, a purpose-built hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) product designed to run both containers and virtual machines under a unified management framework.

“Harvester Government is a modernized approach that provides the stepping stones to migrate away from legacy solutions and towards cloud native infrastructure,” said Camryn Carter, RGS Director of Product Management. “Running VMs alongside your container workloads gives you flexibility to optimize your resources, and RGS has handled security considerations like STIG compliance and encryption for you.”

Harvester Government’s air gap capabilities make it ideal for disconnected environments. It includes embedded documentation for disconnected knowledge management and encryption-at-rest options and supports security image deployments in fully disconnected scenarios. This means agencies working in isolated or tactical environments can maintain high operational efficiency without compromising security.

Unlike Broadcom/VMware’s approach, Harvester Government is purpose-built to run both containers and virtual machines (VMs) under a unified management framework using Kubernetes as the orchestrator. It combines core infrastructure services (block storage, networking, load-balancing, and vGPU support) in an open-source package decoupled from hardware dependencies.

That hardware independence is a meaningful change for agencies working with mixed environments or trying to maximize ROI on existing hardware investments. Older servers collecting dust in your data center can find new purpose with Harvester Government, which gives existing hardware investments a new lease on life and added value.

When paired with Rancher Government, Harvester Government offers features that improve your infrastructure capabilities compared to traditional solutions:

• Define and manage RKE2 clusters as Helm charts
• Implement RBAC with support for various authentication providers
• Deploy GitOps/CD capabilities through Fleet
• Access logging and observability tools

 

Harvester Government also offers Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) capabilities through RGS’s partnership with Kasm Technologies, an infrastructure-agnostic, container-driven approach to VDI. Kasm hosts virtualized applications without requiring an entire desktop environment, bypassing the need for specific Windows or Linux VMs and reducing resource consumption for faster provisioning.

The Compatibility Comparison

You may wonder how Harvester Government stacks up against your existing vSphere environment. While there’s not always a one-to-one comparison, here’s how the core components align:

Harvester Government uses KubeVirt for virtualization instead of ESXi. For storage, Longhorn provides scalable networked block storage compared to vSAN. Management happens through Rancher rather than vCenter, and networking uses Multus and Canal instead of NSX-T.

Things get interesting in areas VMware doesn’t work well. Harvester Government’s container-native approach means you get RKE2 for container orchestration built right in, not bolted on as an afterthought like TKGs. The infrastructure automation capabilities via Fleet/Flux/Argo/Tekton typically outpace Tanzu Automation in flexibility and community support.

Capability	Harvester Government	vSphere
Virtualization	KubeVirt	ESXi
Storage	Longhorn	vSAN
Management	Rancher Manager	vCenter
Cluster Management	Rancher Manager	Tanzu Mission Control
Networking	Multus + Canal	vCenter + NSX-T
Load Balancing	Kube-VIP (L2 & BGP)	NSX-ALB (Avi)
Container Orchestration	RKE2	TKGs/Workload Mgmt
OS Layer	SLE Micro + Elemental	Photon
Ops Management	Rancher Manager + Monitoring	Aria
GitOps Automation	Fleet/Flux/Argo/Tekton	Tanzu Automation
Service Mesh	Istio, Consul, etc.	Tanzu Service Mesh

Security Where It Matters

If you’re handling sensitive government workloads, RGS enhances the upstream Harvester with Rancher Government Carbide™ service to provide hardened security capabilities designed explicitly for high-compliance environments.

Upcoming Rancher Government Carbide™ improvements take security to the next level with:

• FIPS-140-2 or 140-3 compliance at both OS and Kubernetes layers
• US-soil built software assets with SLSA-3 Secure Supply Chain Compliance
• STIGATRON for Day 2 compliance monitoring
• Encryption-at-rest for VM volumes (experimental)
• Out-of-the-box DISA STIG compliance
• Kubewarden Security Policy Engine

 

Applying STIGs to your Kubernetes environment is straightforward with RGS. The process requires just several controls from RGS and a handful of configuration lines for RKE2, making security compliance implementation remarkably efficient for government environments.

A Phased Migration Approach

Unlike the rip-and-replace strategy typical vendors push, migration to Harvester Government follows a phased approach that respects your existing investments. Harvester Government can coexist with your vSphere environment, supporting hybrid applications during the transition.

For VM workloads, Harvester Government includes a VM Import Controller that can connect your vSphere environment and migrate VMs with their volumes intact. It handles network mapping and lets you export migrated VMs as base images for future deployments.

Container migration offers multiple paths depending on your current setup, whether you’re running Docker containers on VMs or managing Kubernetes clusters that can be imported to Rancher Manager.

Licensing Advantages

Since the Broadcom acquisition, VMware licensing has become too complicated and expensive with the consolidated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) approach. Getting a quote can take a long time, which is unacceptable in modern IT environments.

RGS’s pricing model, by contrast, is straightforward:

• Harvester Government bills per server, up to 32 cores
  • includes Rancher Management Server for managing Harvester clusters running VM workloads
• Rancher Suite is billed based on workload resources
  • includes full capabilities of Rancher for kubernetes management, RKE2, Harvester Government, security tools, and more in a single SKU

 

Freedom of Choice, Finally

The cloud-native, container, Kubernetes revolution has changed what’s possible in infrastructure. Harvester Government is a better, less expensive, modern approach to a VMware with Kubernetes as a universal control pane, enabling containers and VMs to live side by side to modernize while maintaining and integrating legacy workloads seamlessly.

To learn more about breaking free from legacy infrastructure constraints, contact us at info@ranchergovernment.com or visit ranchergovernment.com.

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