Upgrade RancherOS Managed by Rancher

Archive RancherOS
1

We have a K8S cluster running that was spun up on premise (vSphere environment) via the Rancher web GUI. All nodes are running on RancherOS and this URL was used for the OS URL in the node template: https://releases.rancher.com/os/latest/rancheros-vmware.iso. It appears when nodes are started up using Rancher on a vSphere environment that the boot device for the node is an ISO that’s created from the above ISO (though inside of the vSphere machine it calls the ISO “boot2docker.iso” when looking at the ISO it’s attached to). I had assumed that RancherOS was getting installed to disk, which explains why my attempts at upgrading the node OS via the command line wasn’t working (since it was just booting off the ISO each boot).

My question is: how would I even go about upgrading the version of RancherOS to the most current version when I’m dealing with it booting off of an ISO provisioned from the Rancher GUI? It’s not as simple as following the directions listed here as it’s booting from an ISO, not the hard drive: https://rancher.com/docs/os/v1.x/en/upgrading/

PS: I did just try to download the most current version of the VMware ISO and rename it and boot from it, but it didn’t start up properly, so something more must be going on with that ISO and it must not just be a default copy of the rancheros-vmware.iso

2

As you’re pointing the URL to “latest/” anyway I suspect the way to upgrade is simply to reboot the node. It will pick up the new ISO and boot to the new version.

3

It is in fact not automatically reaching out to get the latest ISO on reboot. I did find out, though, that if I manually get the rancheros-vmware-autoformat.iso ISO (rather than just rancheros-vmware.iso) that I can rename it to boot2docker.iso and replace the old one manually and it seems to work fine. Downside is… I have to manually do this for every node.

If there is some functionality to make it grab the most current ISO on reboot and update it, then I must be missing it as it’s definitely not attempting to do this for me.

4

I don’t use VMware, but can’t you put the ISO in one location and then have all the VMs point to the same image. then when you replace the ISO all the others pick up the new one. This is how I can do it on Proxmox.

I make my VMs boot via iPXE so I can replace the images referred to.