Rancher Suite K8S Adventure - Chapter 015 - Small Harvester Cluster Additional Node Install

Rancher Suite K8S Adventure - Chapter 015 - Small Harvester Cluster Additional Node Install

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

After installing the first cluster node, subsequent additional nodes are calm and anti-climactic.  Which is nice, once in awhile.

BIOS config is the same for all nodes.  The rechargeable BIOS battery in node harvester-small-3 was dead, quite annoying but it held charge long enough after charging overnight.

• Install of an additional Harvester 1.1.1 node starts with an install question "Create a new" or "Join an Existing". Selected Join Existing on harvester-small-2. 
• Next it asks for install target, I'm installing Harvester itself to the sda and saving the new 1TB nvme0n1 for storage, must use MBR partition table. 
• Then it asks where to store VM data, that's going to be nvme0n1.
• The hostname for harvester-small-2 is the short hostname it is not, AFAIK, the FQDN.
• The Management NIC is the only possible option because this NUC only has one NIC.
• I'm not using VLANs at this time on Harvester-Small cluster.
• Bond mode is irrelevant for a single NIC device.
• I am setting the network addressing static not DHCP.
• The IPv4 Address is asking for a CIDR like 10.10.20.82/16.
• The DNS server setting needs commas between DNS servers.
• It will ask for the existing cluster VIP address which is 10.10.20.80 for registration with the existing cluster.
• It will also ask for the cluster token which is harvester-small.
• The console Password is my usual admin LAN password.
• My NTP server is currently 10.10.5.2 which is a hardware NTP server.
• It will take awhile to install and auto reboot, after which it magically adds itself to the cluster with no human intervention required, very cool!
• If I log into the console web UI using the admin password (which is separate from the console password which merely coincidentally is also my admin password, although your two passwords might be different), then in the web UI I see my new nodes up and running.

Next blog posts on the roadmap are a tour of the Harvester cluster UI, then connection of Rancher to Harvester, then tour the Harvester cluster inside the Rancher UI, then experiment with provisioning some stuff.