HomeLab Deployment of an HA Kubernetes cluster (Part X – Failed Rancher deployment)

I started this deployment without checking the K3s version that Rancher needs. So before I scratched everything and restarted I tried something and documented it. It did not work for me but it could be usueful All the nodes are running version 1.25.5 of Kubernetes and Rancher’s helm chart is working only up to version …

HomeLab – Deployment of an HA Kubernetes cluster (Part 6 – Rancher UI prerequisites)

Select an IP and an FQDN for Rancher UI and create and entry on your local DNS rancher.example.com 10.10.10.159 Load Balancer Use the ACME plugin in pfsense to request and add a certificate for rancher. Then we go to our pfsense and configure one more Virtual IP like we did in part 3 Click on …

HomeLab – Deployment of an HA Kubernetes cluster (Part 4 – K3s nodes installation)

Before we get started let’s create a table Variable Role Example or explanation Example IP LOAD_BALANCER_IP 10.10.10.160 LOAD_BALANCER_FQDN k3scl01 SRV1_IP_ADDRESS 10.10.10.161 SECRET_TOKEN Th1s_1s_a_v3ry_s3cr3t_t0ken_pl3as3_k33p_1t_s@f3 NODE_TOKEN Token taken from the server nodes for agent installations SRV1_DNS_NAME Master K3s-CL01-01 10.10.10.161 SRV2_DNS_NAME Master K3s-CL01-02 10.10.10.162 SRV3_DNS_NAME Master K3s-CL01-03 10.10.10.163 SRV4_DNS_NAME Worker K3s-CL01-04 10.10.10.164 SRV5_DNS_NAME Worker K3s-CL01-05 10.10.10.165 SRV6_DNS_NAME Worker …

HomeLab – Deployment of an HA Kubernetes cluster (Part 3 – Load Balancer – pfsense configuration)

pfsense is a free network firewall software with capabilities envied by its commercial counterparts. The load balancing mechanism is provided by a plugin called HAProxy In this configuration we have deployed two pfsense VMs, one on ESXi1 and one on ESXi2 and configured them in HA. On a previous part we made a note of …

HomeLab Deployment of an HA Kubernetes cluster (Part 1 – Planning and Decisions)

NOTE: The plan was to publish all the blogs when I finished the deployment. Unfortunately, the deployment is paused due to heavy workload but I am publishing the first few parts already Planning My home lab consists of two ESXi 8.0 servers, a QNAP for Network storage, switches and firewalls. A LOT of firewalls 🙂 …