Rancher Requirements

RKE

high-availability RKE cluster

• Three Linux nodes, typically virtual machines, in an infrastructure provider such as Amazon’s EC2, Google Compute Engine, or vSphere.

These nodes must be in the same region/data center. You may place these servers in separate availability zones.

Rancher server data is stored on etcd database that runs on all three nodes.

• etcd is a distributed reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system, with a focus: Simple, Secure, Fast & Reliable.

etcd database requires an odd number of nodes so that it can always elect a leader with a majority of the etcd cluster.

• A load balancer to direct front-end traffic to the three nodes.
• A DNS record to map a URL to the load balancer. This will become the Rancher server URL, and downstream Kubernetes clusters will need to reach it.

1. Set up Linux Nodes

   general installation requirements for OS, container runtime, hardware, and networking.