Newbie Questions: Container Installations / 2nd HDD

1

Hey Guys -

I’m trying to get more experience with Rancher/RancherOS so this morning I rebuilt my container host which ran Fedora Atomic with the latest RancherOS (via ISO & installed on the HDD.) Once done, I installed Rancher via SSH and am currently able to get to the main dashboard of its WebUI. Unfortunately, I’m stuck with a couple of things so wanted to post hoping for assistance. Below are the questions I have…

  1. How can I view & potentially configure containers within Rancher’s web interface? I successfully installed a basic container via SSH once everything above was online, but couldn’t find it anywhere in the webui.
  2. Although only planning to use a single system/node, do I still need to create a cluster for it within the webui?
  3. How can I deploy containers from within the webui?
  4. Rancher OS is installed on /dev/sda which is an SSD. The system also has a 2nd HDD which is much bigger. In Fedora Atomic, the 2nd HDD was mounted into a root folder automatically; but don’t see it yet in Rancher OS. What’s the best way to be able to use it and/or can it be added/configured via Racher’s webui?

I know they are a bit different, but have used Portainer in the past and expected some of the things in the webui to be similar. Below is an example of a sort of container management list which I was looking for in question #1…

example
example1288×161 62.1 KB

Any assistance is appreciated - Thanks!

2

RancherOS gives you a machine with Docker (and not much else) on it. Rancher creates Kubernetes (“k8s”) clusters out of one or more machines with Docker on them.

  1. You can’t*, k8s only knows about and shows the containers it created. Anything manually docker run is not part of the k8s cluster.

  2. Yes, it can be a cluster made up of only the same node the server is on. The server by itself with no clusters doesn’t do much of anything interesting.

  3. You create “workloads”, which create “pods”, which run containers. You cannot* create individual raw docker containers because as in 1, k8s only deals with what it manages.

  4. https://rancher.com/docs/os/v1.x/en/installation/storage/additional-mounts/ . That kind of thing is not in the UI, Rancher is for more like managing a fleet of interchangeable “cattle” nodes, not care and feeding and configuration of an individual “pet” one.

*: In Rancher 2.x. What you’re asking about suggests you’d probably like Rancher 1.x more, since it managed individual docker containers regardless of where they came from. But that is more or less an end-of-life dead end, all new work is on 2.x.