Build a Kubernetes cluster using RKE2 via Ansible

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Ansible RKE2 (RKE Government) Playbook

RKE2, also known as RKE Government, is Rancher's next-generation Kubernetes distribution. This Ansible playbook installs RKE2 for both the control plane and workers.

See the docs more information about RKE Government.

Platforms

The RKE2 Ansible playbook supports all RKE2 Supported Operating Systems

Supported Operating Systems:

• SLES 15
• Rocky 8 and 9
• RedHat: 8 and 9
• Ubuntu: 18, 20, and 22

System requirements

Deployment environment must have Ansible 2.9.0+

Server and agent nodes must have passwordless SSH access

Usage

This playbook requires ansible.utils to run properly. Please see https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/galaxy/user_guide.html#installing-a-collection-from-galaxy for more information about how to install this.

ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml

Create a new directory based on the sample directory within the inventory directory:

cp -R inventory/sample inventory/my-cluster

Second, edit inventory/my-cluster/hosts.yaml to match the system information gathered above. For example:

rke2_cluster:
  children:
    rke2_servers:
      hosts:
        server1.example.com:
    rke2_agents:
      hosts:
        agent1.example.com:
        agent2.example.com:
          node_labels:
          - agent2Label=true"
all:
  vars:
    install_rke2_version: v1.27.10+rke2r1

If needed, you can also edit inventory/my-cluster/group_vars/rke2_agents.yml and inventory/my-cluster/group_vars/rke2_servers.yml to match your environment.

Start provisioning of the cluster using the following command:

ansible-playbook site.yml -i inventory/my-cluster/hosts.yml

Tarball Install/Air-Gap Install

Added the neeed files to the tarball_install directory.

Further info can be found here

Kubeconfig

To get access to your Kubernetes cluster just

ssh ec2-user@kubernetes_api_server_host "sudo /var/lib/rancher/rke2/bin/kubectl --kubeconfig /etc/rancher/rke2/rke2.yaml get nodes"

Available configurations

Variables should be set in inventory/cluster/group_vars/rke2_agents.yml and inventory/cluster/group_vars/rke2_servers.yml. See sample variables in inventory/sample/group_vars for reference.

Uninstall RKE2

Note: Uninstalling RKE2 deletes the cluster data and all of the scripts.

The offical documentation for fully uninstalling the RKE2 cluster can be found in the RKE2 Documentation.

If you used this module to created the cluster and RKE2 was installed via yum, then you can attempt to run this command to remove all cluster data and all RKE2 scripts.

Replace ec2-user with your ansible user.

ansible -i 18.217.113.10, all -u ec2-user -a "/usr/bin/rke2-uninstall.sh"

If the tarball method was used then you can attempt to use the following command:

ansible -i 18.217.113.10, all -u ec2-user -a "/usr/local/bin/rke2-uninstall.sh"

On rare occasions you may have to run the uninstall commands a second time.

Known Issues

• For RHEL8+ Operating Systems that have fapolicyd daemon running, rpm installation of RKE2 will fail due to a permission error while starting containerd. Users have to add the following rules file before installing RKE2. This is not an issue if the install.sh script is used to install RKE2. The RPM issue is expected to be fixed in later versions of RKE2.

cat <<-EOF >>"/etc/fapolicyd/rules.d/80-rke2.rules"
allow perm=any all : dir=/var/lib/rancher/
allow perm=any all : dir=/opt/cni/
allow perm=any all : dir=/run/k3s/
allow perm=any all : dir=/var/lib/kubelet/
EOF

systemctl restart fapolicyd

Author Information

Rancher Government Solutions