Rancher Suite K8S Adventure - Chapter 003 - Software Version Selections

Rancher Suite K8S Adventure - Chapter 003 - Software Version Selections

A travelogue of converting from OpenStack to Suse's Rancher Suite for K8S including RKE2, Harvester, kubectl, helm.

I've been unsatisfied with how other examples online of Rancher Suite installations select their software versions.  I do not personally approve of "just install whatever is git branch latest or main", I've seen that blow up pretty badly.  Everybody knows Helm only supports the previous K8S API version, although that's wrong, because way back in the 3.0.0 days, Helm changed to supporting the last n-3 versions of the K8S API, and who can really memorize anyway that Helm 3.8.x only supports 1.20.x to 1.23.x (honestly, I had to look it up...).  A few minutes of planning ahead, can save many hours of troubleshooting later on.

Anyway.  The process I used was to open up diagram.net and create a big "flowchart" of the nine software components I plan to use, then sequentially cycle thru a list of URLs trying to condense my version selections into one coherent set where everything is predicted to work.

https://www.suse.com/suse-rancher/support-matrix/all-supported-versions/rancher-v2-7-1/

https://www.suse.com/suse-rke2/support-matrix/all-supported-versions/rke2-v1-24/

https://www.suse.com/suse-harvester/support-matrix/all-supported-versions/harvester-v1-1-1/

https://helm.sh/docs/topics/version_skew/

(And many other URLs unfortunately not recorded)

The one exception to the above is "officially" Harvester v1.1.1 only works with the v2.6 branch of Rancher, but unofficially extensive online research indicates everyone says it works just great for them.  Presumably support for Harvester v1.1.1 will only improve with time as Rancher's v2.7 branch develops.

As a disclaimer, this is being written in very early February 2023, on a posting delay to later that month, and you might be reading this post months or even years later, so don't laugh too hard at the "ancient" software versions listed above.

Another disclaimer is this is merely the first version of the plan.  I'm sure changes will be required.