Understanding How Rancher Imports Clusters

Centralizing the management of all your clusters in Rancher is one of the key benefits of using the platform. In addition to creating new clusters, Rancher can also import existing clusters. For example, you may already have a Kubernetes cluster running on a cloud-managed service (like DOKS, EKS, GKE, or another cloud provider) or a self-managed cluster (like RKE, K3s, or another Kubernetes distribution) and you want to manage it using Rancher. You can simply import it and manage it from the UI.

ℹ️ You should not import a cluster that has already been connected to another instance of Rancher as it will lead to data corruption.

To import a cluster, you need to follow these steps:

• Go to GLOBAL APPS > Cluster Management.
• Click on Import Existing.

At this step, you should see different providers including EKS, AKS, and GKE. If your cluster is not on one of these providers, you can use the Generic option. This is our case since we are using RKE2.

You can provide a name and labels to your cluster to help you identify it later:

• In the Cluster Name field, provide a name for your cluster. We will use rke2-cluster.
• In the Labels & Annotations section, add the label: env: learning-rancher.
• In the Agent Environment Variables section, you should add the following environment variable to avoid certificate issues during the import process: STRICT_VERIFY: false

Here is a table to summarize the configurations:

• Click on Create.