I'm trying to get a "test production environment" up and running. The issue is bootstrapping. I have a "clean" harvester environment up and running, far exceeding recommended system requirements. But, the goal is simple. The goal is a Rancher environment running on Harvester. There's a catch-22, you need a Rancher environment to deploy RKE2 on Harvester. Once you deploy RKE2 on Harvester, if you attempt to deploy Rancher on that RKE2, the Rancher you used to deploy RKE2 loses connectivity and the Rancher fails to deploy.

you're looking to build a similar architecture than vCenter appliance running on ESX which in turns manages that ESX right ?