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Is there a way to store the images required for a helm deployment locally on my cluster nodes so pull_policy: IfNotPresent pulls from there instead of internet

No, Always means it has to go out to a registry, even if the node already has the image. You could use the embedded registry mirror though, to satisfy that requirement. Hasn’t been added to the RKE2 docs, but you can check it out at https://docs.k3s.io/installation/registry-mirror

Perhaps you write a script to dump all important running images and reload them after starting the cluster? Perhaps this is helpful: https://blog.scottlowe.org/2020/01/25/manually-loading-container-images-with-containerd/

very cool, thanks for the insight guys