How to deal with bad setup

Rancher 2.x
1

Good morning.

I have a problem with a setup I inherited in the company I work for.
The situation is this we have a rancher cluster setup with 7 nodes: 3 nodes are etcd/controlplane and 4 are worker nodes. The problem is that everything runs on this cluster both Rancher and the applications. All the machine runs on VSphere and are manually created and the rancher was setup with rke.
As far as I have understood reading the documentation this setup can take us to performance problems: the right setup should be to separate the rancher cluster from the kubernetes cluster.
Now, the question: is there a solution to migrate the existing cluster into this new configuration without reinstalling everything.
I’m thinking to create a new local cluster with only rancher installed and then try to importing the existing cluster but I’m worried about the fact that both the cluster hosts rancher and some problem could arise.
Anyone can help?

Thank you in advance for any reply.
Mauro

2

So there is two main ways to solve this problem.

A) Rebuild - Create a new 3 node Rancher management cluster. Then import the current cluster into the new Rancher. Note there will be some clean up needed for projects and Rancher apps like monitoring.

B) Create a new Application cluster - Move all apps minus Rancher to new application cluster. Then scale down the Rancher a 3 node cluster.

3

Thank you for the response. If I follow the “Rebuild” path in which way I can do “cleanup” tasks?
There is something in documentation for this?

Thank you.
Mauro.