Multiple Instances of Rancher Question

Rancher 1.x
1

Greeting All,

Hope that everyone is doing well today.

I have been a lot of reading lately on Rancher and RancherOS as well as on other container solutions out there.

What I have found is that Rancher really has some good and powerful features which is why it draw me back to trying to use it for the project that I have underway.

With that in mind, I started to wonder something. Being that the Rancher Server is really just a container running that uses a lot of the Docker-Machine API and other calls to talk to the base engine, then I was wondering if it would be possible to have multiple instances of the Rancher Server running, in different containers of course, but with the idea that 1 server container supports 1 user and provides a completely separable and isolated environment managing only that users containers?

Of course, this would probably mean that container cluster nodes would, or could, be registered in different ways which is to say that a cluster node might have multiple host registrations, one for each independent Rancher Server container instance.

So then, the question would be as to if a cluster node could be registered to different instances of Rancher Server containers?

For example, if there were 3 physical nodes (A, B, C) and 2 Rancher Server instances (X, Y) then could:

A, B, C >>> X (Could A, B, C be registered nodes of X)

B, C >>> Y (Could only B, C be registered nodes of Y)

Such that X would see 3 hosts and Y would only see 2 hosts.

Any thoughts on this?

Cheers,
Lonnie

2

Hi,

I don’t think it would work that way. However, if you want to have separation of environment with different machines, it is possible with one single Rancher server.

Under http://<rancher-server>:8080/settings/env you can setup the environment. When a Rancher host (agent) is register itself, it will registered to an environment (i.e. you can name them hr / finance).

For example, if there are 5 physical hosts (A, B, C, D, E) and 1 Rancher server with 2 Environments (hr, finance):

A, B, C >>> hr
D, E >>> finance

In fact when you create a user in Rancher server, a new environment will be created for the user. It is the hosts that needed to be registered for that environment.