Rancher on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Rancher on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Rancher 2.14.3 is an open source Kubernetes management platform: a single control plane for provisioning, importing, observing and governing Kubernetes clusters wherever they run. It provides a full web dashboard, centralised authentication and role based access control across every attached cluster, a built in Helm chart catalogue, and cluster wide monitoring, logging and policy tooling. This cloudimg image ships only the Apache 2.0 licensed open source release.

Installed the way upstream supports

Upstream marks the Docker based Rancher install as not supported in production. This image therefore uses the supported path: the official rancher-stable Helm chart deployed onto a single node K3s v1.35.5 cluster running on the VM itself, with cert-manager issuing the TLS certificate. Every container image the platform needs is pre-staged into the VM, so the cluster comes up on first boot without reaching out to a container registry. This is a single node, non highly available Rancher server, well suited to evaluation, development and managing a modest number of downstream clusters; upstream recommends a three node cluster for a control plane that must survive node loss.

Secure by default

Rancher holds the keys to every cluster attached to it, so nothing here ships with a known secret. A unique 24 character administrator password is generated on the first boot of every VM, before the port is reachable, and recorded in a root only credentials file. The build time cluster, including its embedded etcd datastore, its certificate authority private key and its node join tokens, is destroyed before the image is captured and its absence is asserted fail closed, so no two customers ever share a cluster identity. Known default passwords are rejected, unauthenticated API reads return HTTP 401, and the underlying Kubernetes API server and kubelet refuse anonymous callers.

What is included

• Rancher 2.14.3 from the official rancher-stable Helm chart, with cert-manager 1.19.2
• K3s v1.35.5+k3s1 as the underlying Kubernetes cluster, with embedded etcd, containerd, CoreDNS, Traefik and ServiceLB
• All Rancher, cert-manager and K3s container images pre-staged for an offline first boot
• A dedicated 64 GiB data volume for cluster state and the container image store
• A unique administrator password generated per VM on first boot, never baked into the image
• HTTPS on port 443 with port 80 redirecting to it
• A fully patched Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base with automatic security updates

Licensing and support

Rancher is Apache 2.0 licensed and free; only the open source release is included, with no commercial SUSE subscription component. The cloudimg charge covers packaging, security patching, image maintenance and 24/7 expert support. Recommended VM size: Standard_B4ms, which is upstream's smallest endorsed tier because the VM runs both the Kubernetes control plane and the Rancher management server. Prerequisites: an Azure subscription, a VNet and an SSH key. NSG inbound: port 22 for SSH and port 443 for the dashboard and API. Deployment guide: https://www.cloudimg.co.uk/guides/rancher-on-ubuntu-24-04-azure/. 24/7 support: support@cloudimg.co.uk.