Hello we are using Rancher to manage EKS clusters.. we are now looking into managing EKS-D. We have been reading a lot about RKE vs RKE2 (RKE2 seems to be ideal for managing EKS-D) .. We are trying to understand do we use the RKE2 install to create a cluster and Rancher still can manage it? Or do we need to run a whole new install for Rancher with RKE2 https://docs.rke2.io/install/quickstart#server-node-installation <-- this documentation seems to describe that RKE2 has its own separate server node therefore new rancher has to be installed? Documentation seems to not be complete or unclear Sources: https://docs.rke2.io/install/quickstart and https://docs.ranchermanager.rancher.io/pages-for-subheaders/installation-and-upgrade Any information would be helpful!

There was a proof of concept of this published a while back at https://www.suse.com/c/rancher_blog/deploying-amazon-eks-distro-with-rke2/

Thank you for the response/background! Interesting.. so this documentation here : https://docs.ranchermanager.rancher.io/how-to-guides/new-user-guides/kubernetes-cluster-setup/rke2-for-rancher describes RKE2 being installed as a server so it appears that RKE2 is still being developed. And it needs to installed as a server where Rancher Management is installed as well as an agent for all clusters that Rancher needs to manage. Is that correct? Do you recommend RKE2 at all? Managing EKS-D would be a prototype to see how it works, from what we understand it appears we can only import the EKS-D cluster per Article below and that was from 2022. It seems like you can import EKS-D following documentation but it is unclear.. it sounds like SUSE rancher has not tested this management of EKS-D since 2020 then?

EKS-D is just a standard way for Amazon to publish the artifacts that they use internally for EKS clusters. You can take those artifacts and have RKE2 use them instead of the artifacts (binaries) that it would normally use.

Got it. So not great for production use cases. Thank you so much for your clarification!