Putting up a Rancher Kubernetes Cluster on Bare Metal

Do the usual prep for cluster software: same user, same SSH key accepted for that user, passwordless SUDO etc. Install Docker on the nodes.

Grab the rke CLI for your OS from the releases page

Have a look at some starter configs and adjust as necessary:

• Cluster minimal example config (single node)
• My simple config (multi-node non-HA)

Once you have the config to your liking, run

  # rke up
  rke up --config cluster.yaml --ssh-agent-auth
  KUBECONFIG=kube_config_cluster.yaml kubectl get nodes

You get to skip setting up Pod Networking for RKE - Canal is already installed and configured

On our bare metal cluster, we'll use MetalLB - be sure to check releases to get the right URL

  # use new namespace metallb-system
  kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.9.3/manifests/namespace.yaml
  kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.9.3/manifests/metallb.yaml
  # On first install only
  kubectl create secret generic -n metallb-system memberlist --from-literal=secretkey="$(openssl rand -base64 128)"

Give MetalLB a pool of IP addresses

• Here I'm using a pool from the cluster's network

    apiVersion: v1
    kind: ConfigMap
    metadata:
      namespace: metallb-system
      name: config
    data:
      config: |
        address-pools:
        - name: default
          protocol: layer2
          addresses:
          - 172.16.27.230-172.16.27.250      

We're going to install a cluster manager … on the cluster being managed.

There are several options for getting a Web UI overview of either a single cluster or multiple clusters. These will usually offer the ability to display resource usage, view and edit running resources, and create new resources. Some allow higher level options like setting workloads to run on multiple clusters, deploying secrets and config maps across clusters, etc.

A great choice for this is Rancher (not RKE or K3s, which are Kubernetes distributions offered by Rancher Labs). All you have to do to get started is to follow the guide at Rancher Docs: Manual Quick Start

Rancher gives us a great UI for management of this cluster and any other clusters we may want to manage in the future (RKE or not)

  kubectl create ns cattle-system
  helm repo add rancher-stable https://releases.rancher.com/server-charts/stable
  helm install rancher rancher-latest/rancher \
       --namespace cattle-system \
       --set hostname=rancher.local

I find that the Helm chart rancher-2.4.4 exposes port 80 but does not expose port 443. So I needed to expose that before I could run Rancher UI in a browser.

I edited the rancher Service to expose the SSL port under spec.ports

  - name: https
    port: 443
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: 443

If you should ever need to reset the Rancher admin user password

  kubectl  exec -n cattle-system \
           $(kubectl get pods -n cattle-system -o json | jq -r '.items[] | select(.spec.containers[].name=="rancher") | .metadata.name') -- reset-password

After all that hoohaw, I should mention that you can also simply run Rancher from a Docker container - and use that to manage multiple clusters.

  # Run Rancher on all network interfaces
  docker run --name rancher -d --restart=unless-stopped -p 0.0.0.0:80:80 -p 0.0.0.0:443:443 rancher/rancher
  # Reset password when needed
  # docker exec -ti <container_id> reset-password

I used Traefik, installed using the handy Rancher catalog

Set parameters:

Service Type: NodePort
SSL: True
Force HTTP to HTTPS
Enable Dashbord - domain traefik.local

Once deployed, enable load balancer access to the Traefik UI (or create an Ingress, of course)

kubectl -n traefik edit svc traefik-dashboard

• Change to LoadBalancer

An example of creating an Ingress. This is to get into the Longhorn UI

  apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
  kind: Ingress
  metadata:
    namespace: longhorn-system
    labels:
      app: longhorn-frontend
    name: longhorn-ui
  spec:
    rules:
    - host: longhorn-frontend.example.com
      http:
        paths:
        - backend:
            serviceName: longhorn-frontend
            servicePort: http