Rancher PoC - High Availability

Rancher deployment based on RKE2 cluster.

Objectives

This set of scripts aims to simplify the deployment of a highly available Rancher Management Server on RKE2 cluster.

It currently supports the following deployment options:

with direct access to Internet
Internet accessed via Proxy
Airgap
zypper, yum or apt based operating systems (should work on SLES 15 SP2/SP3, CentOS/RHEL 8, Ubuntu 18.04/20.04)

The following files are crucial for your experience:

hosts.list : List of target servers where RKE2 and Rancher will be deployed (generated)
00-vars.sh : Configuration variables
00-prepare-airgap.sh : Preparation for airgap deployment
01-os_preparation.sh : OS validations and preparation
02-rke2_deploy.sh : RKE2 deployment
03-rancher_install.sh: Rancher Management Server deployment
04-cleanup-destroy.sh: Cleanup target servers to start over

Pre-requisites

Systems

1 admin server

The server you will use to execute the scripts

3 rancher management servers

These 3 machines will be used for a 3 nodes RKE2 cluster which will hold the Rancher Management UI The 3 nodes will have: etcd, controlplane and worker roles

The servers are deployed using classic standards

Fixed network settings Internet access (with or without proxy) or Airgap deployment (with or without proxy) Time should be well set DNS should be correct Firewall should be deactivated ... the scripts are here to try and validate that all your settings are good for deployment.

Network

The Rancher UI will need a FQDN which load balances the connections toward the Rancher Management Server nodes.

(optional) You may also need a wildcard FQDN to easily access your applications on the future K8S clusters you will then deploy.

Usage

Clone repository

git clone https://github.com/SUSE-South-EMEA/rancher-poc.git
cd rancher-poc

hosts.list - List target nodes

This file contains the list of target nodes that will be members of the RKE2 cluster and host the Rancher Management Server.

1 FQDN or IP address by line.

00-vars.sh - Variables to be configured

The variables in this file will be used by the scripts.

Edit this file and setup everything according to your environment and the required deployment scenario (normal, proxy, airgap).

00-prepare-airgap.sh - Only for Airgap deployment

This script is only needed in case of an airgap deployment.

It must be run on a node with Internet access and will download everything needed for the next steps.

Once executed, copy the entire rancher-poc directory to the admin server (deployment node) and move forward with next scripts.

01-os_preparation.sh - Validations and OS preparation

Script to validate environment and setup pre-requisites.

./01-os_preparation.sh

02-rke2_deploy.sh - RKE Cluster installation

Deploy a RKE2 cluster on target nodes.

./02-rke2_deploy.sh

03-rancher_install.sh - Rancher Management Server installation

Deploy the Rancher Management Server on the previously deployed RKE2 cluster.

./03-rancher_install.sh

04-cleanup-destroy.sh - Cleanup (CAREFUL!)

Cleanup everything. There's no turning back.

./04-cleanup-destroy.sh