SUSE Virtualization (Harvester): VM Import UI flow
Description
SUSE Virtualization (Harvester) has a vm-import-controller that allows migrating VMs from VMware and OpenStack, but users need to write manifest files and apply them with kubectl to use it. This project is about adding the missing UI pieces to the harvester-ui-extension, making VM Imports accessible without requiring Kubernetes and YAML knowledge.
VMware and OpenStack admins aren't automatically familiar with Kubernetes and YAML. Implementing the UI part for the VM Import feature makes it easier to use and more accessible. The Harvester Enhancement Proposal (HEP) VM Migration controller included a UI flow implementation in its scope. Issue #2274 received multiple comments that an UI integration would be a nice addition, and issue #4663 was created to request the implementation but eventually stalled.
Right now users need to manually create either VmwareSource or OpenstackSource resources, then write VirtualMachineImport manifests with network mappings and all the other configuration options. Users should be able to do that and track import status through the UI without writing YAML.
Work during the Hack Week will be done in this fork in a branch called suse-hack-week-25, making progress publicly visible and open for contributions. When everything works out and the branch is in good shape, it will be submitted as a pull request to harvester-ui-extension to get it included in the next Harvester release.
Testing will focus on VMware since that's what is available in the lab environment (SUSE Virtualization 1.6 single-node cluster, ESXi 8.0 standalone host). Given that this is about UI and surfacing what the vm-import-controller handles, the implementation should work for OpenStack imports as well.
This project is also a personal challenge to learn vue.js and get familiar with Rancher Extensions development, since harvester-ui-extension is built on that framework.
Goals
- Learn Vue.js and Rancher Extensions fundamentals required to finish the project
- Read and learn from other Rancher UI Extensions code, especially understanding the
harvester-ui-extensioncode base - Understand what the
vm-import-controllerand its CRDs require, identify ready to use components in the Rancher UI Extension API that can be leveraged - Implement UI logic for creating and managing
VmwareSource/OpenstackSourceandVirtualMachineImportresources with all relevant configuration options and credentials - Implemnt UI elements to display
VirtualMachineImportstatus and errors
Resources
HEP and related discussion
- https://github.com/harvester/harvester/blob/master/enhancements/20220726-vm-migration.md
- https://github.com/harvester/harvester/issues/2274
- https://github.com/harvester/harvester/issues/4663
SUSE Virtualization VM Import Documentation
Rancher Extensions Documentation
Rancher UI Plugin Examples
Vue Router Essentials
Vue Router API
Vuex Documentation
Harvester UI Extension Repository
My Fork for HackWeek 25
Looking for hackers with the skills:
harvester virtualization susevirtualization vuejs rancherextensions rancher vm-import
This project is part of:
Hack Week 25
Activity
Comments
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1 day ago by dwombacher | Reply
Yes the project is alive and was/is worked on as part of Hack Week. I couldn't invest the time I've planned, so everything is delayed a bit including status updates. A hard nut to crack was that the harvester-ui-extension, when run as standalone product, because a bit different as if it runs in the context of Rancher. That made especially the "show only navi entries when the controller is actually enabled" crazy to figure out.
The current code is here: https://github.com/harvester/harvester-ui-extension/compare/main...wombelix:forkharvesterharvester-ui-extension:suse-hack-week-25
I hope to get a bit more done tonight and throughout the weekend now that I solved the likely hardest problem I had in front of me.
Summary of learnings and achievements up to this point:
For me only showing something in the side nav related to VM Import IF the
vm-import-controlleraddon is actually enabled, was a key goal. And that took me most of my time so far :( I came up with a (hacky?!) solution that works around the fact that in the context of harvester standalone the extension uses a strict whitelist to either show or hide something from he side navi. There is no support forifHaveTypein this situation which would handle it automatically if the extensions runs regularly in the context of Rancher. So if I don't add the ID there, the menu stays hidden. I also found that I can't just check if the Schema exists because the CRD stays in the cluster even after I disable the Addon. On top of that, the menu didn't update automatically when I changed the store settings in my code. I'm no Vue expert, my approach to "fix" this was creating a helper function calledregisterAddonSideNav. It watches the actual Addon resource to see if it is enabled. If it is on, I add the items to the whitelist. If it is off, I remove them. To make the UI update, I used toggled a dummy "favorite" item in the background, which forces the side menu to reload. I made a lot of notes I have to brush up and share that explains the whole process and findings in more detail, including a code walk through... IF someone with more Vue experience thinks that's a valid way doing it, then my approach can be applied to other Addons and their UI flows too. The rest is "standard" (thanks to Richard Cox guiding me through the relevant part of the Rancher Extension and Development Documentation): I use configureType for the behavior and virtualType for the labels. My new function is only relevant for the dynamic visibility. That seem to work pretty well and I use a Vue watcher and not a loop, which a good approach for such a feature.Another helpful resource I didn't know about before: https://extensions.rancher.io/internal/code-base-works/products-and-navigation
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1 day ago by dwombacher | Reply
I ran into a strange bug where the Create page showed OpenStack data even when I clicked on VMware. I initially thought the schema was broken, but I found out I was passing the resource ID as an array to the configuration function instead of a string. This caused the settings to overwrite each other, so every resource looked like the last one I defined. I fixed that syntax error and took the chance to clean up the code. I removed the virtual type definitions entirely because they are not needed if I use the standard label translation pattern. Latest code pushed to my fork and the hack week branch: https://github.com/harvester/harvester-ui-extension/compare/main...wombelix:forkharvesterharvester-ui-extension:suse-hack-week-25 I also added custom headers when listing the resources. Pending: Custom Edit pages, capability to also add and link secrets for vmwaresource and openstacksource, end to end testing.
Similar Projects
A CLI for Harvester by mohamed.belgaied
Harvester does not officially come with a CLI tool, the user is supposed to interact with Harvester mostly through the UI. Though it is theoretically possible to use kubectl to interact with Harvester, the manipulation of Kubevirt YAML objects is absolutely not user friendly. Inspired by tools like multipass from Canonical to easily and rapidly create one of multiple VMs, I began the development of Harvester CLI. Currently, it works but Harvester CLI needs some love to be up-to-date with Harvester v1.0.2 and needs some bug fixes and improvements as well.
Project Description
Harvester CLI is a command line interface tool written in Go, designed to simplify interfacing with a Harvester cluster as a user. It is especially useful for testing purposes as you can easily and rapidly create VMs in Harvester by providing a simple command such as:
harvester vm create my-vm --count 5
to create 5 VMs named my-vm-01 to my-vm-05.
Harvester CLI is functional but needs a number of improvements: up-to-date functionality with Harvester v1.0.2 (some minor issues right now), modifying the default behaviour to create an opensuse VM instead of an ubuntu VM, solve some bugs, etc.
Github Repo for Harvester CLI: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli
Done in previous Hackweeks
- Create a Github actions pipeline to automatically integrate Harvester CLI to Homebrew repositories: DONE
- Automatically package Harvester CLI for OpenSUSE / Redhat RPMs or DEBs: DONE
Goal for this Hackweek
The goal for this Hackweek is to bring Harvester CLI up-to-speed with latest Harvester versions (v1.3.X and v1.4.X), and improve the code quality as well as implement some simple features and bug fixes.
Some nice additions might be: * Improve handling of namespaced objects * Add features, such as network management or Load Balancer creation ? * Add more unit tests and, why not, e2e tests * Improve CI * Improve the overall code quality * Test the program and create issues for it
Issue list is here: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli/issues
Resources
The project is written in Go, and using client-go the Kubernetes Go Client libraries to communicate with the Harvester API (which is Kubernetes in fact).
Welcome contributions are:
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- Documentation
- Go code improvement
What you might learn
Harvester CLI might be interesting to you if you want to learn more about:
- GitHub Actions
- Harvester as a SUSE Product
- Go programming language
- Kubernetes API
- Kubevirt API objects (Manipulating VMs and VM Configuration in Kubernetes using Kubevirt)
Extracting, converting and importing VMs from Nutanix into SUSE Virtualization by emendonca
Description
The idea is to delve into understanding Nutanix AHV internals on how it stores and runs VMs, and how to extract them in an automated way for importing into a KVM-compatible hypervisor, like SUSE Virtualization/Harvester. The final product will be not only be documentation, but a working prototype that can be used to automate the process.
Goals
1) document how to create a simple lab with NutaniX AHV community edition 2) determine the basic elements we need to interact with 3) determine what are the best paths to grab the images through, balancing speed and complexity 4) document possible issues and create a roadmap for tackling them 4) should we adapt an existing solution or implement a new one? 5) implement the solution!
Resources
Similar project I created: https://github.com/doccaz/vm-import-ui Nutanix AHV forums Nutanix technical bulletins
Cluster API Provider for Harvester by rcase
Project Description
The Cluster API "infrastructure provider" for Harvester, also named CAPHV, makes it possible to use Harvester with Cluster API. This enables people and organisations to create Kubernetes clusters running on VMs created by Harvester using a declarative spec.
The project has been bootstrapped in HackWeek 23, and its code is available here.
Work done in HackWeek 2023
- Have a early working version of the provider available on Rancher Sandbox : *DONE *
- Demonstrated the created cluster can be imported using Rancher Turtles: DONE
- Stretch goal - demonstrate using the new provider with CAPRKE2: DONE and the templates are available on the repo
DONE in HackWeek 24:
- Add more Unit Tests
- Improve Status Conditions for some phases
- Add cloud provider config generation
- Testing with Harvester v1.3.2
- Template improvements
- Issues creation
DONE in 2025 (out of Hackweek)
- Support of ClusterClass
- Add to
clusterctlcommunity providers, you can add it directly withclusterctl - Testing on newer versions of Harvester v1.4.X and v1.5.X
- Support for
clusterctl generate cluster ... - Improve Status Conditions to reflect current state of Infrastructure
- Improve CI (some bugs for release creation)
Goals for HackWeek 2025
- FIRST and FOREMOST, any topic is important to you
- Add e2e testing
- Certify the provider for Rancher Turtles
- Add Machine pool labeling
- Add PCI-e passthrough capabilities.
- Other improvement suggestions are welcome!
Thanks to @isim and Dominic Giebert for their contributions!
Resources
Looking for help from anyone interested in Cluster API (CAPI) or who wants to learn more about Harvester.
This will be an infrastructure provider for Cluster API. Some background reading for the CAPI aspect:
SUSE KVM Best Practices - Focus on SAP Workloads and Use Cases by roseswe
Description
SUSE Best Practices around KVM, especially for SAP workloads. Early Google presentation already made from various customer projects and SUSE sources.
Goals
- Complete presentation we can reuse in SUSE Consulting projects
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Resources
KVM (virt-manager) images
SUSE/SAP/KVM Best Practices
- https://documentation.suse.com/en-us/sles/15-SP6/single-html/SLES-virtualization/
- SAP Note 1522993 - "Linux: SAP on SUSE KVM - Kernel-based Virtual Machine" && 2284516 - SAP HANA virtualized on SUSE Linux Enterprise hypervisors https://me.sap.com/notes/2284516
- SUSECon24: [TUTORIAL-1253] Virtualizing SAP workloads with SUSE KVM || https://youtu.be/PTkpRVpX2PM
- SUSE Best Practices for SAP HANA on KVM - https://documentation.suse.com/sbp/sap-15/html/SBP-SLES4SAP-HANAonKVM-SLES15SP4/index.html
Q2Boot - A handy QEMU VM launcher by amanzini
Description
Q2Boot (Qemu Quick Boot) is a command-line tool that wraps QEMU to provide a streamlined experience for launching virtual machines. It automatically configures common settings like KVM acceleration, virtio drivers, and networking while allowing customization through both configuration files and command-line options.
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Goals
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Updates
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- Dec 2, 2025 : added external monitor via telnet option
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Resources
Reassess HiFive Premier P550 board (for RISC-V virtualization) by a_faerber
Description
With growing interest in the RISC-V instruction set architecture, we need to re-evaluate ways of building packages for it:
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- No devices shown in lsblk -- 6.16 appears to be lacking device drivers still
Resources
Extracting, converting and importing VMs from Nutanix into SUSE Virtualization by emendonca
Description
The idea is to delve into understanding Nutanix AHV internals on how it stores and runs VMs, and how to extract them in an automated way for importing into a KVM-compatible hypervisor, like SUSE Virtualization/Harvester. The final product will be not only be documentation, but a working prototype that can be used to automate the process.
Goals
1) document how to create a simple lab with NutaniX AHV community edition 2) determine the basic elements we need to interact with 3) determine what are the best paths to grab the images through, balancing speed and complexity 4) document possible issues and create a roadmap for tackling them 4) should we adapt an existing solution or implement a new one? 5) implement the solution!
Resources
Similar project I created: https://github.com/doccaz/vm-import-ui Nutanix AHV forums Nutanix technical bulletins
Contribute to terraform-provider-libvirt by pinvernizzi
Description
The SUSE Manager (SUMA) teams' main tool for infrastructure automation, Sumaform, largely relies on terraform-provider-libvirt. That provider is also widely used by other teams, both inside and outside SUSE.
It would be good to help the maintainers of this project and give back to the community around it, after all the amazing work that has been already done.
If you're interested in any of infrastructure automation, Terraform, virtualization, tooling development, Go (...) it is also a good chance to learn a bit about them all by putting your hands on an interesting, real-use-case and complex project.
Goals
- Get more familiar with Terraform provider development and libvirt bindings in Go
- Solve some issues and/or implement some features
- Get in touch with the community around the project
Resources
- CONTRIBUTING readme
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Liz - Prompt autocomplete by ftorchia
Description
Liz is the Rancher AI assistant for cluster operations.
Goals
We want to help users when sending new messages to Liz, by adding an autocomplete feature to complete their requests based on the context.
Example:
- User prompt: "Can you show me the list of p"
- Autocomplete suggestion: "Can you show me the list of p...od in local cluster?"
Example:
- User prompt: "Show me the logs of #rancher-"
- Chat console: It shows a drop-down widget, next to the # character, with the list of available pod names starting with "rancher-".
Technical Overview
- The AI agent should expose a new ws/autocomplete endpoint to proxy autocomplete messages to the LLM.
- The UI extension should be able to display prompt suggestions and allow users to apply the autocomplete to the Prompt via keyboard shortcuts.
Resources
The Agentic Rancher Experiment: Do Androids Dream of Electric Cattle? by moio
Rancher is a beast of a codebase. Let's investigate if the new 2025 generation of GitHub Autonomous Coding Agents and Copilot Workspaces can actually tame it. 
The Plan
Create a sandbox GitHub Organization, clone in key Rancher repositories, and let the AI loose to see if it can handle real-world enterprise OSS maintenance - or if it just hallucinates new breeds of Kubernetes resources!
Specifically, throw "Agentic Coders" some typical tasks in a complex, long-lived open-source project, such as:
❥ The Grunt Work: generate missing GoDocs, unit tests, and refactorings. Rebase PRs.
❥ The Complex Stuff: fix actual (historical) bugs and feature requests to see if they can traverse the complexity without (too much) human hand-holding.
❥ Hunting Down Gaps: find areas lacking in docs, areas of improvement in code, dependency bumps, and so on.
If time allows, also experiment with Model Context Protocol (MCP) to give agents context on our specific build pipelines and CI/CD logs.
Why?
We know AI can write "Hello World." and also moderately complex programs from a green field. But can it rebase a 3-month-old PR with conflicts in rancher/rancher? I want to find the breaking point of current AI agents to determine if and how they can help us to reduce our technical debt, work faster and better. At the same time, find out about pitfalls and shortcomings.
The Outputs
❥ A "State of the Agentic Union" for SUSE engineers, detailing what works, what explodes, and how much coffee we can drink while the robots do the rebasing.
❥ Honest, Daily Updates With All the Gory Details
A CLI for Harvester by mohamed.belgaied
Harvester does not officially come with a CLI tool, the user is supposed to interact with Harvester mostly through the UI. Though it is theoretically possible to use kubectl to interact with Harvester, the manipulation of Kubevirt YAML objects is absolutely not user friendly. Inspired by tools like multipass from Canonical to easily and rapidly create one of multiple VMs, I began the development of Harvester CLI. Currently, it works but Harvester CLI needs some love to be up-to-date with Harvester v1.0.2 and needs some bug fixes and improvements as well.
Project Description
Harvester CLI is a command line interface tool written in Go, designed to simplify interfacing with a Harvester cluster as a user. It is especially useful for testing purposes as you can easily and rapidly create VMs in Harvester by providing a simple command such as:
harvester vm create my-vm --count 5
to create 5 VMs named my-vm-01 to my-vm-05.
Harvester CLI is functional but needs a number of improvements: up-to-date functionality with Harvester v1.0.2 (some minor issues right now), modifying the default behaviour to create an opensuse VM instead of an ubuntu VM, solve some bugs, etc.
Github Repo for Harvester CLI: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli
Done in previous Hackweeks
- Create a Github actions pipeline to automatically integrate Harvester CLI to Homebrew repositories: DONE
- Automatically package Harvester CLI for OpenSUSE / Redhat RPMs or DEBs: DONE
Goal for this Hackweek
The goal for this Hackweek is to bring Harvester CLI up-to-speed with latest Harvester versions (v1.3.X and v1.4.X), and improve the code quality as well as implement some simple features and bug fixes.
Some nice additions might be: * Improve handling of namespaced objects * Add features, such as network management or Load Balancer creation ? * Add more unit tests and, why not, e2e tests * Improve CI * Improve the overall code quality * Test the program and create issues for it
Issue list is here: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli/issues
Resources
The project is written in Go, and using client-go the Kubernetes Go Client libraries to communicate with the Harvester API (which is Kubernetes in fact).
Welcome contributions are:
- Testing it and creating issues
- Documentation
- Go code improvement
What you might learn
Harvester CLI might be interesting to you if you want to learn more about:
- GitHub Actions
- Harvester as a SUSE Product
- Go programming language
- Kubernetes API
- Kubevirt API objects (Manipulating VMs and VM Configuration in Kubernetes using Kubevirt)
Liz - Prompt autocomplete by ftorchia
Description
Liz is the Rancher AI assistant for cluster operations.
Goals
We want to help users when sending new messages to Liz, by adding an autocomplete feature to complete their requests based on the context.
Example:
- User prompt: "Can you show me the list of p"
- Autocomplete suggestion: "Can you show me the list of p...od in local cluster?"
Example:
- User prompt: "Show me the logs of #rancher-"
- Chat console: It shows a drop-down widget, next to the # character, with the list of available pod names starting with "rancher-".
Technical Overview
- The AI agent should expose a new ws/autocomplete endpoint to proxy autocomplete messages to the LLM.
- The UI extension should be able to display prompt suggestions and allow users to apply the autocomplete to the Prompt via keyboard shortcuts.
Resources
Rancher/k8s Trouble-Maker by tonyhansen
Project Description
When studying for my RHCSA, I found trouble-maker, which is a program that breaks a Linux OS and requires you to fix it. I want to create something similar for Rancher/k8s that can allow for troubleshooting an unknown environment.
Goals for Hackweek 25
- Update to modern Rancher and verify that existing tests still work
- Change testing logic to populate secrets instead of requiring a secondary script
- Add new tests
Goals for Hackweek 24 (Complete)
- Create a basic framework for creating Rancher/k8s cluster lab environments as needed for the Break/Fix
- Create at least 5 modules that can be applied to the cluster and require troubleshooting
Resources
- https://github.com/celidon/rancher-troublemaker
- https://github.com/rancher/terraform-provider-rancher2
- https://github.com/rancher/tf-rancher-up
- https://github.com/rancher/quickstart
Rancher Cluster Lifecycle Visualizer by jferraz
Description
Rancher’s v2 provisioning system represents each downstream cluster with several Kubernetes custom resources across multiple API groups, such as clusters.provisioning.cattle.io and clusters.management.cattle.io. Understanding why a cluster is stuck in states like "Provisioning", "Updating", or "Unavailable" often requires jumping between these resources, reading conditions, and correlating them with agent connectivity and known failure modes.
This project will build a Cluster Lifecycle Visualizer: a small, read-only controller that runs in the Rancher management cluster and generates a single, human-friendly view per cluster. It will watch Rancher cluster CRDs, derive a simplified lifecycle phase, keep a history of phase transitions from installation time onward, and attach a short, actionable recommendation string that hints at what the operator should check or do next.
Goals
- Provide a compact lifecycle summary for each Rancher-managed cluster (e.g.
Provisioning,WaitingForClusterAgent,Active,Updating,Error) derived fromprovisioning.cattle.io/v1 Clusterandmanagement.cattle.io/v3 Clusterstatus and conditions. - Maintain a phase history for each cluster, allowing operators to see how its state evolved over time since the visualizer was installed.
- Attach a recommended action to the current phase using a small ruleset based on common Rancher failure modes (for example, cluster agent not connected, cluster still stabilizing after an upgrade, or generic error states), to improve the day-to-day debugging experience.
- Deliver an easy-to-install, read-only component (single YAML or small Helm chart) that Rancher users can deploy to their management cluster and inspect via
kubectl get/describe, without UI changes or direct access to downstream clusters. - Use idiomatic Go, wrangler, and Rancher APIs.
Resources
- Rancher Manager documentation on RKE2 and K3s cluster configuration and provisioning flows.
- Rancher API Go types for
provisioning.cattle.io/v1andmanagement.cattle.io/v3(from therancher/rancherrepository or published Go packages). - Existing Rancher architecture docs and internal notes about cluster provisioning, cluster agents, and node agents.
- A local Rancher management cluster (k3s or RKE2) with a few test downstream clusters to validate phase detection, history tracking, and recommendations.
Extracting, converting and importing VMs from Nutanix into SUSE Virtualization by emendonca
Description
The idea is to delve into understanding Nutanix AHV internals on how it stores and runs VMs, and how to extract them in an automated way for importing into a KVM-compatible hypervisor, like SUSE Virtualization/Harvester. The final product will be not only be documentation, but a working prototype that can be used to automate the process.
Goals
1) document how to create a simple lab with NutaniX AHV community edition 2) determine the basic elements we need to interact with 3) determine what are the best paths to grab the images through, balancing speed and complexity 4) document possible issues and create a roadmap for tackling them 4) should we adapt an existing solution or implement a new one? 5) implement the solution!
Resources
Similar project I created: https://github.com/doccaz/vm-import-ui Nutanix AHV forums Nutanix technical bulletins