Quick question. What's the minimum hardware requirements for rke2 server running Rancher and agents? I was going to use a node with 16gb ram for the control plane and nodes with 8gb for agent nodes. This will be a small production cluster with a total of 9 machines / servers.

Did https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.6/en/installation/requirements/ not give you the info you were looking for?

I tend to disagree with the requirements, as 8gb ram is not enough to run a control plane. When I have three servers with 8GB RAM, 1TB drive and multi core / processor the load average stays above or near 4.0 load.

It is minimum requirements, and I usually try to use higher than minimum for safety margin. That said I tend to consider load averages to only be actionable when I look into why they're getting where they are (I've seen load numbers get into the hundreds from uninterruptible sleep with an overstressed NFS server - which is a problem, but not the problem of the node that was seeing it).