Using Rancher with groups of bare metal servers?

Archive Rancher 1.x
1

Recently I saw Rancher at a meetup and it looked pretty promising, now I am trying to find my way around.

Server groups:
a) 3 bare metal servers for data ingest (lots of space)
b) 3 bare metal servers for Kafka/Zookeeper
c) 3 bare metal servers for processing (lots of power)
d) 3 bare metal servers for Elasticsearch (lots of space again)

In the beginning I did not understand how I determine which service runs on which server. At first I created one environment and put labels on the hosts (group-a, group-b, …), but could not assign services to those labels (or server groups). Then I created different environments for every group of servers.

Now the environments are separated, I can run the services on the dedicated servers. But now I can’t acessone group of servers from another, I assume they are in separated networks.

How can I

  1. place services (e.g. Kafka + Zookeeper or Elasticsearch) only on dedicated groups of machines?
  2. be able to access hosts in one group from another?

Thanks
bluepuma

2

It is possible using labels.

https://docs.rancher.com/rancher/v1.1/en/cattle/scheduling/

Hope this helps

3

Thanks for the response.

I used labels and set a label like “group=group-b” on hosts from group b.

But when I then go into “Catalog->All” and open for example “Zookeeper”, there is no option to limit to rules, only “Launch”. I would have expected to set those rules on that page, before launching.

Am I missing something? I am running Rancher v1.4.1

4

Nothing wrong.

Catalog items don’t know anything about your labels or custom scheduling ideas. They just work and demonstrate that it does work.

To actually use most of the catalog items exactly the way you want to use them you need to make your own rancher-compose etc. Catalog items are just two text files after all. GLHF