Getting Rancher LongHorn to work with RancherOS on vSphere

I was looking for an easy solution to getting a testing environment ready to explore Kubernetes (K8s).  I wnet through several itierations and testing to see what would be the best fit. I found Rancher to be a great solution for me. I run a small lab host at home and Rancher allowed me to deploy a K8s cluster quickly with many bells and whistles that I need to see the potential of K8s without getting lost in the process. 

Rancher 2.4 is what I am running. I am running it as a docker container. I am deploying RancherOS nodes in my home lab using the vSphere plugin within Rancher. 

One of the big hang ups in other K8s quick starts is shared storage. Rancher offers LongHorn and it is a clustered solution that is native to the deployment. However, it requires just a bit of tweaking to get it to work with RancherOS. Here is the process: 

**If at first you don't succeed, start with sudo!

  1. Go to the console of the RancherOS VM deployed. IT should already be deployed with the user logged in. 
  2. You will need to change the base shell to Ubuntu. This is because 1 or 2 libraries in RancherOS is not up to date with what LongHorn needs to run.
    1. COMMAND: sudo ros console switch ubuntu
  3. Once that is complete, you will now need to enable iSCSI service on the node. 
    1. COMMAND: sudo ros s enable open-iscsi
  4. At this point, I would recommend a reboot of the node
    1. COMMAND: sudo reboot
  5. When the node comes back online, you will need to start the iSCSI service. 
    1. COMMAND: sudo ros s up open-iscsi
  6. You will need to start the iSCSI service, or ensure it is started, any time to reboot or power on. 
I hope this helps you! Took me a while to stitch this together. Good luck in your K8s travels! 

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