I’ve read that as of Harvester 1.7.0 BIOS boot was deprecated, has it really gone?
My lab is made up from little HP T740 thin clients with only 4c/8t and well, processor use can be an issue.
I also have some HP DL360p gen8 with 20c/40t and twice the ram at 128gb sitting idle, they can not be upgrade to UEFI (as far as I know). Yes they draw lots of power and make a little more noise, but they are certainly a better fit for a small system to learn with.
In the end, I’d like to run a vcluster for Rancher and Kubernetes work loads (again a lab), but certainly not on my T740. The DL360 gen 9 got UEFI, but prices are nuts and almost everything has the ram ripped out or are over $1000usd, same with the gen10 which would be even better. Since the lab comes out of my pocket, it’s very hard to justify right now.
Any ideas would be most welcome.
This is covered briefly in the release notes under “Deprecations and Removals”:
Legacy BIOS Booting
Support for legacy BIOS booting is removed in v1.8.0. Existing Harvester clusters that use this boot mode will continue to function, but upgrading to later versions may require re-installation in UEFI mode. To avoid issues and disruptions, use UEFI in new installations.
In a bit more detail, in case it helps:
- If you’re doing a new deployment with Harvester v1.8.0, that can only be installed on UEFI systems (the ISO won’t boot on legacy BIOS systems, nor will the installer succeed if PXE booted on legacy ISO systems).
- If you already have Harvester v1.7.0 installed on legacy BIOS systems, those can still be upgraded to v1.8.0.
- At some point in future, there will be a Harvester release which it is not possible to upgrade to, if you are on a legacy BIOS system, and this will require reconfiguring/reinstalling/redeploying with UEFI instead prior to upgrade. At this stage I suspect that’s probably going to be either Harvester v1.9 or v1.10.
I understand that dropping BIOS support may be frustrating, but it’s ultimately unavoidable due to BIOS support disappearing from components that Harvester is built on top of. There’s some further background in https://github.com/harvester/harvester/issues/9382
1 Like
Thanks. I was just hoping there might be a way to keep this going in BIOS. I’m kind of on the lookout for servers that have UEFI and take DDR3. I found some 2ru HP but I really only have room for 1ru with an airspace, they may need to be tight racked.
