Rancher Setup

Introduction

Rancher is used to manage multiple clusters. Being a critical component of cluster administration it is highly recommended that Rancher itself runs on a Kubernetes cluster with sufficient replication for high availability and avoiding a single point of failure.

Prerequisites

• One Virtual machine running on the same network as the rest of the nodes, and has access to them. For recommended configuration of the VM refer to Hardware Requirements

Installation using Kubernetes

Kubernetes cluster setup

• SSH into the node

• Create the rke2 config directory:

  mkdir -p /etc/rancher/rke2

• Create a config.yaml file in the above directory, using this config file template; rke2-server.conf.primary.template

• Edit the above config.yaml file with the appropriate names and IPs. IMPORTANT: Remove the section for disabling ingress-nginx in this config file.

  curl -sfL https://get.rke2.io | sh -

• Start rke2 using this

  systemctl enable rke2-server

• Download and install kubectl and helm. And execute this:

  • echo -e 'export PATH="$PATH:/var/lib/rancher/rke2/bin"\nexport KUBECONFIG="/etc/rancher/rke2/rke2.yaml"' >> ~/.bashrc
    source ~/.bashrc

  • kubectl get nodes

It is recommended to set up a double-node cluster for high availability. However, for the non-production environments, you may create a single node cluster to conserve resources

Rancher installation

• To install Rancher use this (hostname to be edited in the below command):

  helm repo add rancher-latest https://releases.rancher.com/server-charts/latest
  helm repo update
  helm install rancher rancher-latest/rancher \
    --namespace cattle-system \
    --create-namespace \
    --set hostname=rancher.openg2p.org \
    --set ingress.tls.source=tls-rancher-ingress

  • Configure/Create TLS secret accordingly.

  kubectl create secret tls tls-rancher-ingress -n cattle-system \
      --cert=path/to/cert/file \
      --key=path/to/key/file

Longhorn Setup

• Install Longhorn as a Rancher App

Keycloak setup

• From kubernetes/rancher folder, run the following to install Keycloak (hostname to be edited in the below command)

• helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
  helm repo update
  helm install keycloak bitnami/keycloak \
    -n keycloak \
    --create-namespace \
    --version "7.1.18" \
    --set ingress.hostname=keycloak.openg2p.org \
    --set ingress.extraTls[0].hosts[0]=keycloak.openg2p.org \
    -f keycloak-values.yaml

Integrate Rancher and Keycloak

Integrate Rancher and Keycloak using Rancher Auth - Keycloak (SAML) guide.

Installation using Docker

Refer to Installing Rancher using Docker guide.