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Version: v1.1

Air Gapped Environment

This section describes how to use Harvester in an air gapped environment. Some use cases could be where Harvester will be installed offline, behind a firewall, or behind a proxy.

The Harvester ISO image contains all the packages to make it work in an air gapped environment.

Working Behind an HTTP Proxy​

In some environments, the connection to external services, from the servers or VMs, requires an HTTP(S) proxy.

Configure an HTTP Proxy During Installation​

You can configure the HTTP(S) proxy during the ISO installation as shown in picture below:

iso-proxy

Configure an HTTP Proxy in Harvester Settings​

You can configure the HTTP(S) proxy in the settings page of the Harvester dashboard:

  1. Go to the settings page of the Harvester UI.
  2. Find the http-proxy setting, click ⋮ > Edit setting
  3. Enter the value(s) for http-proxy, https-proxy and no-proxy.

proxy-setting

note

Harvester appends necessary addresses to user configured no-proxy to ensure the internal traffic works. i.e., localhost,127.0.0.1,0.0.0.0,10.0.0.0/8,longhorn-system,cattle-system,cattle-system.svc,harvester-system,.svc,.cluster.local. harvester-system was added into the list since v1.1.2.

When the nodes in the cluster do not use a proxy to communicate with each other, the CIDR needs to be added to http-proxy.noProxy after the first node is installed successfully. Please refer to fail to deploy a multi-node cluster.

Guest Cluster Images​

All necessary images to install and run Harvester are conveniently packaged into the ISO, eliminating the need to pre-load images on bare-metal nodes. A Harvester cluster manages them independently and effectively behind the scenes.

However, it's essential to understand a guest K8s cluster (e.g., RKE2 cluster) created by the Harvester node driver is a distinct entity from a Harvester cluster. A guest cluster operates within VMs and requires pulling images either from the internet or a private registry.

If the Cloud Provider option is configured to Harvester in a guest K8s cluster, it deploys the Harvester cloud provider and Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver.

cluster-registry

As a result, we recommend monitoring each RKE2 release in your air gapped environment and pulling the required images into your private registry. Please refer to the Harvester CCM & CSI Driver with RKE2 Releases section on the Harvester support matrix page for the best Harvester cloud provider and CSI driver capability support.