The underlying issue here is that this YAML https://github.com/harvester/experimental-addons/blob/main/rancher-vcluster/rancher-vcluster.yaml says

enabled: false

and doesn't have a hostname or bootstrap password set. Once you enable the addon and set your own hostname and password, if you then later re-apply the YAML downloaded from that URL, your changes will be clobbered -- that's just how

kubectl apply

works...

The most recent change to rancher-vcluster was just a bump to the rancher and k3s version -- see https://github.com/harvester/experimental-addons/commit/ebb49b680fa3b919c3434a3bd25ccce4e0d73f42 -- if you have rancher-vcluster already running, and then go edit the addon yaml (either via the harvester GUI, or via

kubectl edit

) and only change those version strings, your existing rancher-vcluster environment should be upgraded inplace. This is something that probably needs to be documented better...