Rancher Manager (Experimental)

The rancher-vcluster add-on allows you to run Rancher Manager as a workload on the underlying SUSE® Virtualization cluster and is implemented using vcluster.

The add-on runs a nested K3s cluster in the rancher-vcluster namespace and deploys Rancher to this cluster.

During the installation, the ingress for Rancher is synced to the SUSE® Virtualization cluster, allowing end users to access Rancher.

Installing rancher-vcluster

The rancher-vcluster add-on is not packaged with SUSE® Virtualization, but you can find it in the experimental-addons repo.

Assuming you are using the SUSE® Virtualization kubeconfig, you can run the following commands to install the add-on:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/harvester/experimental-addons/main/rancher-vcluster/rancher-vcluster.yaml

Configuring rancher-vcluster

After installing the add-on, you need to configure it from the SUSE® Virtualization UI as follows:

Select Advanced > Add-ons.
Find the rancher-vcluster add-on and select ⋮ > Edit Config.
In the Hostname field, enter a valid DNS record pointing to the SUSE® Virtualization VIP. This is essential as the vcluster ingress is synced to the parent SUSE® Virtualization cluster. A valid hostname is used to filter ingress traffic to the vcluster workload.
In the Bootstrap Password field, enter the bootstrap password for the new Rancher deployed on the vcluster.

Once the add-on is deployed, Rancher can take a few minutes to become available.

You can then access Rancher via the hostname DNS record that you provided.

See Rancher Integration for more information.

Disabling rancher-vcluster

The rancher-vcluster add-on is deployed on a vcluster Statefulset that uses a Longhorn PVC.

When rancher-vcluster is disabled, the PVC data-rancher-vcluster-0 will remain in the rancher-vcluster namespace.

If you enable the add-on again, the PVC is re-used, and Rancher will have the old state available again.

If you want to wipe the data, ensure that the PVC is deleted.