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Hi all, would it be safe to use the embedded Ranch...
# harvester
w
Hi all, would it be safe to use the embedded Rancher/Fleet in a Harvester cluster? For example, I want to install a helm chart directly into my Harvester cluster, could I just use the embedded fleet for this? Would that break anything for future Harvester upgrades?
w
Yes, and support for that is going GA in the Rancher 2.15 and Harvester 1.9 release pairing
today, this setting needs to be enabled in the Global Settings -> Feature Flags in the Rancher instance:
w
Ok awesome! I have to enable that feature flag in the embedded rancher inside of harvester? Just for clarification, I do not want to use a separate rancher and have the harvester registered to it, I just want to use the embedded rancher thats already in harvester.
w
That format I'm not certain about (as to whether it's "formally supported"), but worth a shot
if it has some functionality disabled, you could move to the next option of running a full rancher management cluster inside of harvester, then registering harvester to that: docs.harvesterhci.io/v1.8/advanced/addons/rancher-vcluster
w
Ok yeah I have been down the route of the rancher management cluster addon but not quite what I'm looking for. I think I might try using the embedded one. I just worry if a harvester upgrade will wipe my additional fleet bundles I add. I would think that a harvester upgrade simply just updates the harvester-mcc bundles rather than modifying all bundles. Thanks for the info tho!
w
I don't think it'll wipe em out. But definitely curious as to what you find!
l
We successfully completed the Harvester upgrade from v1.7.1 to v1.8.2 (with embedded Rancher). The process went incredibly smoothly and didn't impact Rancher at all. The nodes upgraded sequentially, automatically migrating workloads to the active nodes to ensure zero downtime.
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g
please do not use the embedded rancher
please manage harvester via an external rancher.. and use 
baremetal-workload
feature and deploy helm charts using external rancher
w
why is that @great-bear-19718?
End goal is I want to be able to create virtual machines inside my harvester cluster with fleet
g
please use an external rancher.. the embedded rancher is only for bootstrapping harvester and is limited in its functionality
it is also upgraded as part of Harvester upgrades and cannot be upgraded out of band
we also have plans to drop it in the future to simplify harvester operations
w
So just to be clear you do mean the actual embedded rancher that comes with harvester right? NOT the rancher experimental k3k/vcluster add on right?
g
the embedded one in rancher
k3k/vcluster deploys an additional full rancher
which you can use for workload management
w
There are plans to drop the embedded rancher in harvester? So the mcc-harvester bundle resource that gets created wont get installed with the internal fleet anymore?
I originally have tried to install the latest rancher into vcluster, but have had lots of issues with it. I thought about just using the addon that comes with harvester like I mentioned, but that locks you into a specific version of rancher for a specific Harvester version.
g
i would recommend just running rancher in a VM on top of the harvester cluster for long term ops
w
ok I wanted to use fleet to provision that long running vm that would have rancher installed. If I shouldnt do that though then I wont. Just curious so I can learn more about the harvester upgrade process, how would a harvester upgrade break additional fleet resources if I were to use the embedded rancher in harvester?
g
it will not break upgrade.. but we may drop rancher and that will break your workloads
we already have some work in flight and if you run into say some issues which needs a new version of fleet
then you are tied to whatever Harvester ships.. there are a number of reasons for avoiding this
l
Sorry, I was confused with the Rancher deployment. In ours case we installed Rancher externally, and it didn't lose any workloads after the upgrade
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