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Although Rancher can run on a single system, for high availability, create a RKE2 Kubernetes cluster with a minimum of three nodes.
Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2 (RKE2) is a fully conformant Kubernetes distribution that focuses on security and government compliance. As RKE1 is now defocused, its use is not recommended.
The RKE2 cluster will host Rancher and act as the management control plane, exclusively dedicated to Rancher’s operations. No user applications or workloads should be run on this cluster.
RKE2 has an embedded etcd database that stores data on disk. The performance of RKE2 is directly affected by the performance of the etcd database. To ensure optimal performance, use high-speed storage solutions such as a PowerStore system and implement PowerStore and VMware vSphere best practices. For more information, see the white paper Dell PowerStore VMware vSphere Best Practices.
For operating systems supported by RKE2, see the requirements on RKE2 Installation Requirements.
zypper install chrony
Update time server information in /etc/chrony.conf.
systemctl enable chrony --now
On RHEL-based systems, NetworkManager is generally the go-to tool for managing network services and interfaces. To ensure proper routing by the Container Network Interface (CNI), configure NetworkManager to disregard network interfaces related to Calico or Flannel. To do this, create a new configuration file named rke2-canal.conf in the /etc/NetworkManager/config.d/ directory, and populate it with the following content:
[keyfile]
unmanaged-devices=interface-name:cali*;interface-name:flannel*
In addition, if the system has the NetworkManager-cloud-setup package installed, which provides the nm-cloud-setup.service service and nm-cloud-setup.timer service, administrators should disable these two services that could cause network routing interference.
systemctl disable nm-cloud-setup.service
systemctl stop nm-cloud-setup.service
systemctl disable nm-cloud-setup.timer
systemctl stop nm-cloud-setup.timer
SLES 15 operating system typically use wicked, a network management tool, for network setup. Enable the recommended IPv4 and/or IPv6 forwarding settings in the sysctl configuration files. Create a new file named 90-rke2.conf in the /etc/sysctl.d/ directory and populate it with the following content.
net.ipv4.conf.all.forwarding=1
net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1
If a firewall is enabled on the system, open the required ports to ensure smooth communication between the nodes. The network rules are provided on the RKE2 Installation Requirements page.
RKE2 also supports other CNI network plugins. For further details, see the RKE2 Network Options page.