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recommended setup is to have separate nodes running the rancher management cluster. However, you can deploy VMs using harvester, and connect your virtualization cluster (harvester management cluster) to the rancher server running on harvester VMs. I think that is only for R&D (non-production) environments.

This is just a home lab setup, so the R&D setup will work. I've tried setting up 3 VMs and installing K3s and I had a crazy challenging time getting networking to work properly. I was really hoping to use the Kubernetes cluster hosting harvester to also run Rancher. That just seems to make so much more sense.

gotcha, in that case you can just spin up a VM and use the docker install of rancher to get started. We do not support running rancher and harvester on the same cluster, unless virtualized as I have described above (either on a VM k8s cluster, or docker install of rancher). if that makes sense

I wrote a Community article on using Rancher with Docker in Harvester VM - see https://community.suse.com/posts/how-to-manage-harvester-030-with-rancher-261-running-in-a-vm-within-harvester I need to update for latest versions but hopefully it's still useful - the Rancher/Harvester integration is now easier.

I guess I should have mentioned that I was hoping to have a fault tolerant / clustered setup, not just a single node. It is for my lab, so I'm limited on HW, but I'd still like redundancy.