Why not support a docker-compose file with a configured mysql image to run rancher server?

Yes I would not suggest having Rancher contain its own universe, though it would probably work until something goes wrong and you could probably fix it with manual intervention when it does…

For example, service containers created by Rancher do not actually have the --restart=always flag passed to Docker because Rancher manages restarts. So if the container(s) died and it can no longer make queries it wouldn’t be able to restart the containers.