Convert rancher provisioned cluster to custom cluster?

shad0wfax · March 20, 2026, 7:54pm

Unfornutateley: No There a really old Issue about this:

Add ability to gracefully detach Rancher-provisioned clusters and hosted Kubernetes clusters from Rancher and still be able to manage the clusters

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

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Convert rancher provisioned cluster to custom cluster?

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