Installation Requirements

If you install Rancher on a hardened Kubernetes cluster, check the Exempting Required Rancher Namespaces section for detailed requirements.

You can deploy Rancher on an IPv6-only or dual-stack Kubernetes cluster.

For details on Rancher’s IPv6-only and dual-stack support, see the IPv4/IPv6 Dual-stack page.

Here are the requirements for configuring the Rancher Management Server:

Because the Rancher Management Server is deployed via Helm onto an underlying Kubernetes cluster, host container runtime requirements are determined by that cluster’s distribution:

All core Rancher Management Server container images (including rancher/rancher, rancher-webhook, and fleet) are published as multi-architecture container manifests (linux/amd64 and linux/arm64).

The host container runtime automatically detects the CPU architecture of each node and pulls the matching x86_64 or ARM64 image variant at runtime. No architecture-specific image tags or custom Helm configuration flags are required.

Ensure the ntp package (or an equivalent service like chrony or systemd-timesyncd) is installed and active on all host nodes. Synchronized time across cluster nodes prevents TLS certificate validation errors and communication failures.

Default host firewall rules on some Linux distributions can block internal Kubernetes cluster communication:

RKE2 bundles its own container runtime, containerd.

For details on which OS versions were tested with RKE2, refer to the Rancher support matrix.

For the container runtime, K3s bundles its own containerd by default. Alternatively, you can configure K3s to use an already installed Docker runtime. For more information on using K3s with Docker see the K3s documentation.

Rancher needs to be installed on a supported Kubernetes version. To find out which versions of Kubernetes are supported for your Rancher version, refer to the Rancher support matrix. To specify the K3s version, use the INSTALL_K3S_VERSION environment variable when running the K3s installation script.

If you are installing Rancher on a K3s cluster with Raspbian Buster, follow these steps to switch to legacy iptables.

If you are installing Rancher on a K3s cluster with Alpine Linux, follow these steps for additional setup.

Rancher’s hardware footprint depends on a number of factors, including:

Since there are a high number of influencing factors that may vary over time, the requirements listed here should be understood as reasonable starting points that work well for most use cases. Nevertheless, your use case may have different requirements. For inquiries about a specific scenario please contact Rancher for further guidance.

In particular, requirements on this page are subject to typical use assumptions, which include:

Higher numbers are possible but requirements might be higher. If you have more than 20,000 resources of the same type, loading time of the whole list through the Rancher UI might take several seconds.

The following table lists minimum CPU and memory requirements for each node in the upstream cluster.

Please note that a highly available setup with at least three nodes is required for production.

(*): Large deployments require that you follow best practices for adequate performance.

(†): Larger deployment sizes are generally possible with ad-hoc hardware recommendations and tuning. You can contact Rancher for a custom evaluation.

Refer to RKE2 documentation for more detailed information on RKE2 general requirements.

The following table lists minimum CPU and memory requirements for each node in the upstream cluster.

Please note that a highly available setup with at least three nodes is required for production.

(*): External Database Host refers to hosting the K3s cluster data store on an dedicated external host. This is optional. Exact requirements depend on the external data store.

(†): Large deployments require that you follow best practices for adequate performance.

Refer to the K3s documentation for more detailed information on general requirements.

The following table lists minimum CPU and memory requirements for each node in the upstream cluster.

Please note that a highly available setup with at least three nodes is required for production.

These requirements apply to hosted Kubernetes clusters such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). They don’t apply to Rancher SaaS solutions such as Rancher Prime Hosted.

(*): Large deployments require that you follow best practices for adequate performance.

Each node used should have a static IP configured, regardless of whether you are installing Rancher on a single node or on an HA cluster. In case of DHCP, each node should have a DHCP reservation to make sure the node gets the same IP allocated.

To operate properly, Rancher requires a number of ports to be open on Rancher nodes and on downstream Kubernetes cluster nodes. Port Requirements lists all the necessary ports for Rancher and Downstream Clusters for the different cluster types.

If you use a load balancer, it should be be HTTP/2 compatible.

To receive help from SUSE Support, Rancher Prime customers who use load balancers (or any other middleboxes such as firewalls), must use one that is HTTP/2 compatible.

When HTTP/2 is not available, Rancher falls back to HTTP/1.1. However, since HTTP/2 offers improved web application performance, using HTTP/1.1 can create performance issues.