• After install you will see this happy screen:

    Create a Virtual Machine

    Create a Unique Namespace for VMs

    (Not a requirement, but namespaces keep things tidy in Kubernetes)Click on Namespaces on the left and the Create button on the right

    Upload a VM Boot ISO

    Let's give our VM an installation ISO.Click on Images on the left and the Create button on the right


    Choose your namespace, type a name, type a description. Either upload an ISO or provide the URL to an ISO

    Click Create and you will get a progress speedometer

    Create a VM Network



    A VM Network sits on a Cluster Network. The built-in Cluster Network is a host-only network. To allow VMs to access the outside world, and to allow the outside world to access the VMs, you need to create and external Cluster Network and then place a VM Network there.

    Cluster Network

    I have a second NIC in my server, so I created an external Cluster Network on that NIC. First, I created a very simple Cluster Network named "nic2"

    Then I created a Network Config for that Cluster Network and gave it a description.



    I only have one node, so I took the default Node Selector of "Select all nodes"


    I chose my second NIC from the drop down and left the rest of the fields at their defaults. 

    VM Network

    Now onto the VM Network. Choose "VM Networks" in the left menu

    Click Create




    Give your VM Network a name, a description, choose VLAN or Untagged, choose the Cluster Network it should ride on. If you chose VLAN, specify the VLAN ID.  Click Create again.

    Create a VM


    Choose Virtual Machines in the left menu, Click Create, Define Name, CPU & RAM. Name must be lowercase.


    Define your Boot ISO as Type CD-ROM (The size field is not important)

    Click Add Volume to add the root disk (Note the light gray "boot order" specification)

    Choose your external network

    Those are the most important steps. You can skip the other steps for a simple VM. Now click CreateYou will see your new VM listed as "Unschedulable" for a minute. This is a red herring. Just ignore this. 🙂

    After about a minute, the VM state will change to "Running"

    You can now open a graphical console and install the OS as usual


    Once installed and rebooted, the new VM should be on the network segment you specified. Yay.


    What's nice is that Harvester automagically displays the IP address of the VM in the list of VMs


    Backup a VM

    There are many options to protect your new VMs. Regular scheduled backups are not available in the GUI, but I'm sure you could write a shell script that runs regularly in cron.


    Thank You

    Thanks for reading this post. I hope you found the post informative. I welcome your feedback, corrections, and improvements.