Running K3s with Rancher

Rancher 2.x
1

Hi,
I was wondering how would you go about managing a k3s cluster with Rancher.

Can you create one using the “create custom cluster” when adding a new cluster or do you have to import an existing one and what would the drawbacks of importing rather than creating a new one be?

Can you also have an RKE cluster node as the “control unit” and attach k3s nodes as workers to it, or is this not possible?

Background is that I’m trying to add local Raspberry PIs to the cluster and use a lightweight cluster like k3s on them.

Thanks for your help :slight_smile:

Disclaimer: I’m very new to the Kubernetes game, so please excuse if the questions are silly.

2

“Create custom cluster” is RKE. You cannot “mix” RKE and k3s. Create a separate k3s cluster and import it into Rancher. Importing means that the definition of the cluster is managed externally by some other software (in this case k3s) and Rancher only manages what is “inside” the cluster.

(Though in 2.4 there will be some support for managing the definition of clusters we see are k3s even though they are imported.)

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