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.

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

• 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.