A home-lab friendly container orchestration option: RKE2 with Rancher

Recently I ran across this GitLab blog by “clemenko” setting up RKE2 (SUSE Linux backed K8s) with Rancher (GUI for management) and a few other handy plugins.

• The main blog: https://github.com/clemenko/rke_install_blog
• And a follow-up blog for installing in air-gapped situations: https://github.com/clemenko/rke_airgap_install

This blog shows deploying a small three-node cluster (VMs on a cloud), but I was able to setup a single-node RKE2+Rancher node on a single machine in my home lab.