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Title
o

orange-garden-15886

08/11/2022, 10:04 PM
Good afternoon channel, we've got a brand new AWS EKS cluster that we attempted to import into Rancher, and getting this error: Cluster must have at least one managed nodegroup. Googling the error produced some opened/closed issues, but nothing on how to really get it fixed/import successfully. Rancher version is v2.6.4 EKS is also integrated with SpotInst, so no plans on creating NodeGroups via console/rancher per se Any suggestions ?
a

agreeable-waiter-30020

08/12/2022, 3:04 AM
Importing an EKS cluster as an EKS cluster (rather than a generic cluster) requires that the EKS cluster has at least one EKS (not Rancher) managed node group. If your EKS cluster doesn't have a managed node group, then you can always import it into Rancher as a generic cluster.
o

orange-garden-15886

08/12/2022, 3:16 AM
thank you ! i do not understand the requirement behind having the node group for genuine eks cluster versus generic, however if i was to import the cluster as generic, would i be missing out on a functionality ? how does rancher use node group, that it's a hard prerequisite ?
a

agreeable-waiter-30020

08/12/2022, 4:01 PM
The requirement comes from the fact that Rancher wants to put a deployment on the EKS cluster, but the pods in that deployment can't be scheduled on the control plane. Therefore, in order to try to guarantee that the pods will be successfully scheduled, Rancher will check for a managed node group (the only type of node group that can be found via the EKS API). If you import the cluster as a generic cluster versus an EKS cluster, then you won't be able to manage the cluster itself (add managed node groups, update the Kubernetes version, etc). You will be able to manage the items in the cluster (essentially anything you can do with helm and kubectl you would be able to do from the Rancher UI).
o

orange-garden-15886

08/12/2022, 4:04 PM
understood, thank you for this explanation!
One more question, i created the managed node group and now the message changed to: "*Waiting for API to be available*" Where can i get more info / better understanding why the cluster still can not be imported as AWS EKS ?
a

agreeable-waiter-30020

08/15/2022, 3:34 PM
That is again related to the workloads that Rancher deploys in the downstream (your EKS) cluster. You can check the
cattle-cluster-agent
pods in the
cattle-system
namespace on your EKS cluster. Those pods and their logs should give an indication of what is happening.