ranchom
November 26, 2025, 1:55pm
1
I would like to know if it is possible to convert one Racher provisioned cluster in VMware (Rancher manages nodes creation and deletion in addition to the RKE2 kubernetes) to a custom cluster (Rancher only managed RKE2 kubernetes of the manually provisioned nodes). Because I want Rancher to stop managing the creation and deletion of my nodes. Is that possible?
I use Longhorn and in a chaotic update of the cluster, which involed the deletion and creation of new nodes, I lost the Longhorn volumes. (Probably it was my fault)
Regards,
Unfornutateley: No There a really old Issue about this:
opened 02:00AM - 04 Feb 20 UTC
internal
team/hostbusters
**What kind of request is this (question/bug/enhancement/feature request):**
Fe… ature request
This feature is intended to allow a clean break for people in the following situations:
- Users who don't want to use Rancher at all anymore
- Users who want to keep using Rancher, but don't want a specific Rancher-provisioned or hosted Kubernetes cluster to be managed by Rancher anymore
- Users who want to detach a cluster from a Rancher server because they intend to import it into a different Rancher server
- Users who are a beginner at using Rancher, who may have misconfigured the Rancher server URL, which cannot be changed, so they need to import the cluster into a different Rancher instance
- Users who have not configured Rancher backups properly, who are trying to recover from a disaster in which the Rancher server's cluster is destroyed
Currently, the capability to "detach" a cluster from Rancher is only available for imported clusters. By "detach," I'm referring to the ability to disconnect the cluster from Rancher, remove Rancher components from the cluster, and continue to manage authentication, RBAC, and everything else without Rancher.
It would be nice to have the same capability for RKE clusters and hosted Kubernetes clusters. Right now, the workloads on these clusters will still operate if the Rancher server is deleted, assuming you have root access to the individual clusters. But these clusters will use a snapshot of the authentication as it was configured when Rancher was removed, and the cluster agent and node agents will still exist on the downstream cluster without being used. For those who want to keep their cluster, but don't want it managed by Rancher, it would be nice to support a way to detach the cluster from Rancher, remove all Rancher components, and preserve full control over the cluster.
The existing capabilities for removing Rancher were documented here https://github.com/rancher/docs/pull/2238 for this issue https://github.com/rancher/docs/issues/2040
SURE-4812