Find Your Edge: Running SUSE Rancher and K3s with SLE Micro on Dell VxRail
Wed, 28 Sep 2022 10:26:37 -0000
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Find Your Edge: Running SUSE Rancher and K3s with SLE Micro on Dell VxRail
Existing examples of this collaboration have already begun to bear fruit with work done to validate SUSE Rancher and RKE2 on Dell VxRail. You can find more information on that in a Solution Brief here and blog post here. This initial example was to highlight deploying and operating Kubernetes clusters in a core datacenter use case.
But what about providing examples of jointly validated solutions for near edge use cases? More and more organizations are looking to deploy solutions at the edge since that is an increasing area where data is being generated and analyzed. As a result, this is where the focus of our ongoing technology validation efforts recently moved.
Our latest validation exercise featured deploying SUSE Rancher and K3s with the SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro operating system (SLE Micro) and running it on Dell VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure. These technologies were installed in a non-production lab environment by a team of SUSE and Dell VxRail engineers. All the installation steps that were used followed the SUSE documentation without any unique VxRail customization. This illustrates the seamless compatibility of using these technologies together and allowing for standardized deployment practices with the out-of-the-box system capabilities of both VxRail and the SUSE products.
Solution Components Overview
Before jumping into the details of the solution validation itself, let’s do a quick review of the major components that we used.
- SUSE Rancher is a complete software stack for teams that are adopting containers. It addresses the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes (K8s) clusters, including lightweight K3s clusters, across any infrastructure, while providing DevOps teams with integrated tools for running containerized workloads.
- K3s is a CNCF sandbox project that delivers a lightweight yet powerful certified Kubernetes distribution.
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro (SLE Micro) is an ultra-reliable, lightweight operating system purpose built for containerized and virtualized workloads.
- Dell VxRail is the only fully integrated, pre-configured, and tested HCI system optimized with VMware vSphere, making it ideal for customers who want to leverage SUSE Rancher, K3s, and SLE Micro through vSphere to create and operate lightweight Kubernetes clusters on-premises or at the edge.
Validation Deployment Details
Now, let’s dive into the details of the deployment for this solution validation.
First, we deployed a single VxRail cluster with these specifications:
- 4 x VxRail E660F nodes running VxRail 7.0.370 version software
- 2 x Intel® Xeon® Gold 6330 CPUs
- 512 GB RAM
- Broadcom Adv. Dual 25 Gb Ethernet NIC
- 2 x vSAN Disk Groups:
- 1 x 800 GB Cache Disk
- 3 x 4 TB Capacity Disks
- vSphere K8s CSI/CNS
After we built the VxRail cluster, we deployed a set of three virtual machines running SLE Micro 5.1. We installed a multi-node K3s cluster running version 1.23.6 with Server and Agent services, Etcd, and a ContainerD container runtime on these VMs. We then installed SUSE Rancher 2.6.3 on the K3s cluster. Also included in the K3s cluster for Rancher installation were Fleet GitOps services, Prometheus monitoring and metrics capture services, and Grafana metrics visualization services. All of this formed our Rancher Management Server.
We then used Rancher to deploy managed K3s workload clusters. In this validation, we deployed the two managed K3 workload clusters on the Rancher Management Server cluster. These managed workload clusters were single node and six-node K3s clusters all running on vSphere VMs with the SLE Micro operating system installed.
You can easily modify this validation to be more highly available and production ready. The following diagram shows how to incorporate more resilience.
Figure 1: SUSE Rancher and K3s with SLE Micro on Dell VxRail - Production Architecture
The Rancher Management Server stays the same, because it was already deployed with a highly available four-node VxRail cluster and three SLE Micro VMs running a multi-node K3 cluster. As a production best practice, managed K3s workload clusters should run on separate highly available infrastructure from the Rancher Management Server to maintain separation of management and workloads. In this case, you can deploy a second four-node VxRail cluster. For the managed K3s workload clusters, you should use a minimum of three-node clusters to provide high availability for both the Etcd services and the workloads running on it. However, three nodes are not enough to provide node separation and high availability for the Etcd services and workloads. To remedy this, you can deploy a minimum six-node K3s cluster (as shown in the diagram with the K3s Kubernetes 2 Prod cluster).
Summary
Although this validation features Dell VxRail, you can also deploy similar architectures using other Dell hardware platforms, such as Dell PowerEdge and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes running VMware vSphere!
For more information and to see other jointly validated reference architectures using Dell infrastructure with SUSE Rancher, K3s, and more, check out the following resource pages and documentation. We hope to see you back here again soon.
Author: Jason Marques
Dell Resources
- Dell VxRail Hyperconverged Infrastructure
- Dell VxRail System TechBook
- Solution Brief – Running SUSE Rancher and K3s with SLE Micro on Dell VxRail
- Reference Architecture - SUSE Rancher, K3s, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro for Edge Computing: Based on Dell PowerEdge XR11 and XR12 Servers
SUSE Resources