Airgapping Rancher Made Easy with Harvester and Terraform

Learn the ins and outs of airgap-installations for RKE2 and Rancher Multi-Cluster Manager (MCM) onto Harvester with RGS Field Engineer, Brian Durden. We’ll use declarative Terraform code to deploy an RKE2 cluster and then install Rancher MCM on top within an airgapped environment. We will dive into the process and explore how a declarative infrastructure tool like Terraform makes managing Rancher MCM in an airgap environment a breeze.
github.com/bcdurden/airgappin...

[@doresearchstopwhining]

I spent a lot of time trying to evaluate Harvester and decided to not use it since it forces you to use Longhorn which doesn't have the performance needed for my application. If IOPs is not important to you, then you will be fine. But if DB performance is important, best to not adopt a solution where you throw out 50% of your performance out of the gate.

[@calwooten]

Are you aware of a method to automate the step where you add harvester to be managed by rancher via terraform? Or will this just have to be a manual step copy pasting the link between rancher / harvester?

[@amac1211]

Could the same be accomplished if you were running bare metal with no hypervisor? Sense you have the binaries in the iso’s, if you did not want to virtualize could you still utilize this method?

[@calwooten]

Would the kubeconfig file for your provider just be sitting on the machine where your terraform is running? Presumably I could run terraform from outside harvester to provision resources on harvester as long as I have that kubeconfig file? I'm still trying to wrap my head around how all this ties together, super interesting video though thanks!

[@RancherGovernmentSolutions]

Yes. Ideally your kubeconfig file should be local to the TF files.