What is the agent node from the installation instruction?

1

Running Rancher is as simple as launching two containers. One container as the management server and another container on a node as an agent.
https://docs.rancher.com/rancher/v1.2/en/installing-rancher/installing-server/

From in the instruction above it is saying about manager and agent, now my two questions are

  1. What is an agent node? why does it has to be in the same manager node?
  2. Why there’s no instruction to install agent node?
2

Go to UI.

Infrastructure > Hosts

Click on add host

and run the docker run cmd in step 5.

3

The server (API, UI, etc) is one container. “Node” in that sentence is a host/computer which will be used to run your containers. Each node runs the Rancher agent, which is another container, and that does what the server says to to create/restart/etc containers.

The server container can be run on a host that is also running the agent, but there is no reason it has to.

1 Like
4

Thanks! It’s clearer now. Is this concept only applies on Cattle or to any other supported orchestration?

5

You add hosts to a Rancher environment. If using Kubernetes/Mesos/Swarm it is then also automatically added as the appropriate concept in there (e.g. node in k8s).