Rancher has released a development build of Harvester v1.8.0, the open-source hyperconverged infrastructure platform built on Kubernetes. The 2026-02-15 build introduces CD-ROM hot-plugging for virtual machines, allowing users to inject and eject virtual discs while VMs are running without requiring a restart or migration.
The release includes full installation ISOs for both AMD64 and ARM64 architectures, with ARM64 support expanding Harvester's deployment options to server-class ARM hardware. New features include filesystem disk support for VMs, OpenStack cloud provider integration with config-drive, and cluster-wide pod security standards enforcement. The platform also addresses several upgrade issues that previously caused failures when migrating from v1.6.x to v1.7.0, particularly around the kubeovn-operator and fleet components.
Additional improvements include CPU masking for live migration compatibility across heterogeneous nodes, enhanced NVIDIA driver toolkit controls that prevent accidental disabling when vGPU devices are active, and fixes for raw image uploads to external storage. The build also introduces remote status monitoring for deployment readiness and updates the monitoring and logging addons to newer versions.
This is an unsupported testing release intended for development and bug reporting purposes only. Rancher explicitly warns against using it in production environments and notes that upgrades to or from this build are not supported. Users interested in testing can download the ISOs and related kernel files directly from the Harvester releases server.