Chicken or Egg question.. Can i use Harvester (on owned metal) to host kubernetes pods or i need to installer Rancher on same harvester cluster, then use same harvester hosts again but controlled thru those Rancher VM's) i can add i tried this on 1.6.0 and it basically killed the Harvester UI and rerouted a lot of things to Rancher... - had to reinstall Harvester from scratch eventually.

Users can run bare-metal workloads on Harvester. However, you may interfere with some of the default services used to expose the Harvester UI or other system components.

what is the recommendation if i want VM's and kubernetes workloads on the same hosts/harvester cluster?

Technically Harvester can run pods directly. There is a secret Rancher already installed. You can enable it by enabling “developer features”. However it is not wide supported. It is recommended to host your pods in a VM.

well its kind of experimental on my side too (to work with pods) as long as it does not kill the existing VM's 🙂 iam fine

Then you can do it. Networking might be a challenge depending on your layout. Flat is best for this. Under support you can also get a kubeconfig to use externally to manage k8s.

(late to the party) bare-metal container support is going GA with 1.9

NICE

@wooden-orange-91877 - to answer your original question (or one of them, anyhow 😉 The pattern you described is how I like to build my environment: • deploy Harvester on 3 nodes (i use PXE) • upload Cloud Image(s), create ssh-key(s), CloudConfiguration Files, VMnetworks, IPPool/LoadBalancer • Deploy 3 SL-Micro VMs and install RKE2 on them (plumbed via the IPPool and LoadBalancer) • Install Rancher Manager on the RKE2 cluster • Add the harvester cluster as a provider to Rancher • manage downstream clusters from Rancher