Question born out of general ignorance: is it feasible to run several rancher instances in the same k3s cluster? I’d like to reuse the same physical infrastructure, but I need more instances due to wildly conflicting end user needs

Nope. You could run multiple copies of k3s on a single host though, with k3d

thanks! saved me hours of frantic searching - I’ll look into retooling for k3d 🙂