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SUSE Rancher

SUSE Rancher

Overview

What is SUSE Rancher?

Developed by Rancher Labs and now from SUSE, Rancher is open-source software that enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale, on any infrastructure across the data center, cloud, branch offices, and the network edge. Rancher centrally manages Kubernetes…

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Learn from top reviewers

SUSE Rancher Review

Rating: 10 out of 10
September 9, 2024
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
SUSE Rancher handles Kubernetes cluster management challenges by offering consistent reliability and enhanced DevOps efficiency. It simplifies adoption with a unified interfac...
Continue reading
Verified user
Engineer
SUSE Rancher5 years of experience

Orchestrating your containerised micro-services with ease

Rating: 6 out of 10
June 25, 2024
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We use SUSE Rancher within our organisation to orchestrate Docker containers across a number of micro services. SUSE Rancher is great for managing connectivity between differe...
Continue reading
Verified user
Consultant
SUSE Rancher5 years of experience

Rancher - Kubernetes-based platforms reimagined

Rating: 10 out of 10
February 13, 2024
Vetted ReviewVerified User
We are using Rancher at corporate scale: multiple cluster, tens of projects, 300 Namespaces, 500 applications developers and administrators, thousands of Business users and cl...
Continue reading
Szymon Madej
Team Lead - Information Technology
DevOps Architect for Containerization Platforms and Microservices
PZU
SUSE Rancher2 years of experience

Orchestrate Kubernetes everywhere

Rating: 8 out of 10
September 18, 2023
Vetted ReviewVerified User
We use SUSE Rancher as our central tool for orchestrating our Kubernetes landscape to enable standarization, governance, lifecycle managment and visibility. By using SUSE Ran...
Continue reading
Verified user
Professional
SUSE Rancher2 years of experience

Rancher

Rating: 8 out of 10
September 15, 2023
Vetted ReviewVerified User
We need to run our Kubernetes-Clusters in an Air-Gapped environment and need the opportunity to manage all these clusters and also append new ones in short time.
Continue reading
Verified user
Engineer
SUSE Rancher3 years of experience

SUSE Rancher: Perfect Tool for Kubernetes Management

Rating: 9 out of 10
May 29, 2023
Vetted ReviewVerified User
We work with multiple clients and by the time we have multiple cluster hosted on multiple cloud platforms. It's very difficult to manage all those cluster manually or through ...
Continue reading
Aman Rawal
Project Manager - Information Technology
Senior Software Engineer
Web Bakers
SUSE Rancher2 years of experience

Review for Suse Rancher

Rating: 10 out of 10
April 20, 2023
Vetted ReviewVerified User
I am using Suse Rancher to manage Kubernetes system. This has a good Graphical user interface to Manage the Kubernetes Cluster. We are using the cloud environment for our Kube...
Continue reading
Saikat Saha
Consultant - Information Technology
Infra Architect
Cognizant
SUSE Rancher2 years of experience

SUSE Rancher is all you need to run Kubernetes

Rating: 10 out of 10
July 27, 2022
Vetted ReviewVerified User
We use SUSE Rancher to run Kubernetes production workloads. We chose Rancher because: +) It's easy to manage users and their permissions. +) It's the most complete Kubernetes ...
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Verified user
Administrator
SUSE Rancher4 years of experience

Using Rancher as Kubernetes Dashboard and Cluster Management for Developers

Rating: 9 out of 10
March 30, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We needed a web dashboard software for our AWS EKS development clusters on Kubernetes with granular user access connected to our SSO and as we had been using in the past Ranch...
Continue reading
Marcello Teodori
Engineer - Information Technology
Senior Manager
Alfresco
SUSE Rancher3 years of experience

SUSE Rancher review

Rating: 9 out of 10
March 17, 2022
Vetted ReviewVerified User
We use SUSE Rancher to help us with the management of Kubernetes clusters and the management of our containers in several environments.
Continue reading
Verified user
Consultant
SUSE Rancher1 year of experience

Open Source K8s Management Solution - Great for Bare Metal Installations

Rating: 10 out of 10
March 14, 2022
Vetted ReviewVerified User
We started using SUSE Rancher to manage K8s clusters on bare metal. In the beginning, we mainly use it to deploy and upgrade new clusters. Then we noticed that the UI is a gre...
Continue reading
Verified user
Administrator
SUSE Rancher1 year of experience

Gather Up Your Cloud Cattle with Rancher

Rating: 7 out of 10
February 24, 2022
IncentivizedVetted Review
Customers of Datalounges build, maintain and manage cloud native applications on a variety of Kubernetes platforms. Often these are provided by hyper scalers such as Google an...
Continue reading
Kim Aaltonen
Manager - Corporate
Managing Director
Datalounges Oy
SUSE Rancher2 years of experience

Rancher - A Comprehensive Kubernetes Platform

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 17, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We use SUSE Rancher in our organization for managing our Production environment which consists of multiple K8s Clusters. We also use Rancher to set up our clusters in multi-cl...
Continue reading
Ajinkya Bapat
Engineer - Information Technology
DevOps Consultant
Infogain
SUSE Rancher3 years of experience

Managing and controlling your Kubernetes cluster in a simple way

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 9, 2022
Vetted ReviewVerified User
The main use of SUSE Rancher has been to easily manage different Kubernetes clusters using different environments. One of the main advantages provided by this solution is its ...
Continue reading
Jose Manuel Ortega
Engineer - Research & Development
Software Engineer
UA - Universidad de Alicante / Universitat d'Alacant
SUSE Rancher1 year of experience

Round'em up!

Rating: 9 out of 10
January 24, 2022
Vetted ReviewVerified User
We have two installations of Rancher (prod and non-prod). each rancher instance manages multiple clusters. We are using rancher to better enable users to interact with the clu...
Continue reading
Verified user
Engineer
SUSE Rancher2 years of experience
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Pricing

View all pricing

Subscription license

7,594.99

Cloud
per year up to 500 nodes

Standard Subscription

11,234.99

Cloud
per year 10 nodes

Priority Subscription

30,514.99

Cloud
per year 10 nodes

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.insight.com/en_US/shop/prod…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $7,594.99 per year up to 500 nodes
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Product Demos

Digital Twin: AR/VR – Live Demo for Advanced Customer Experience on SUSE Rancher and FUSEML

YouTube

Deploying F5 BIG-IP & NGINX with SUSE Rancher

YouTube

Understanding Continuous Delivery in SUSE Rancher (Demo)

YouTube

Fujitsu Enterprise Postgres (FEP) SUSE Rancher Demo

YouTube

Getting started with SUSE Rancher and Ondat persistent storage

YouTube

Deploy and manage Linux - SLE Micro and SLE Micro for SUSE Rancher

YouTube
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Features

Container Management

Features commonly found in Container Management software.

8.2
Avg 7.8
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Product Details

What is SUSE Rancher?

Rancher is an open-source software that enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale, on any infrastructure across the data center, cloud, branch offices, and the network edge. According to the vendor, Rancher centrally manages Kubernetes clusters across the organization in order to ensure security and accelerate transformation. Rancher is also available hosted. Hosted Rancher is a fully managed Rancher control plane - presented as the fastest, most cost-effective path to multi-cluster Kubernetes in an enterprise.

Available as an additional option, Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) is a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution that runs entirely within Docker containers. It is designed to solve the common frustration of installation complexity with Kubernetes by removing most host dependencies and presenting a stable path for deployment, upgrades, and rollbacks.

SUSE Rancher Video

Short Introduction to Rancher

SUSE Rancher Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Developed by Rancher Labs and now from SUSE, Rancher is open-source software that enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale, on any infrastructure across the data center, cloud, branch offices, and the network edge. Rancher centrally manages Kubernetes clusters across the organization in order to ensure security and accelerate transformation. Rancher is also available hosted. Hosted Rancher is a fully managed Rancher control plane - presented as the fastest, most cost-effective path to multi-cluster Kubernetes in an enterprise.

SUSE Rancher starts at $7594.99.

Reviewers rate Container Orchestration highest, with a score of 9.2.

The most common users of SUSE Rancher are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(32)

Reviews

(1-17 of 17)

SUSE Rancher Review

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
September 09, 2024
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 10,001+ employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
5 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
SUSE Rancher handles Kubernetes cluster management challenges by offering consistent reliability and enhanced DevOps efficiency. It simplifies adoption with a unified interface for developers and real-time business insights. Use cases span general IT operations, infrastructure reliability, and simplified automation. However, evaluating the investment should account for staff expertise and project priorities. We offer it as an alternative to the cloud.
Pros
  • Simplifies K8
  • Easy to use UI
  • Offers a CLI
Cons
  • Upgrades are slow
  • Lack of standards
  • UI can be glitchy/slow
Likelihood to Recommend
Well-Suited Scenarios:
Multicloud/Multitenant Deployments: SUSE Rancher excels in managing Kubernetes clusters across multiple providers. It provides a consistent experience across all tenants.
Prod Workloads: Organizations use SUSE Rancher to run Kubernetes production workloads. The interface simplifies management and devs don’t need to be familiar with kubectl or K8 in general.

Less Appropriate Scenarios:
Limited Staff Expertise: If your team lacks K8 expertise, the complexity of managing clusters might be difficult.
Minimal/Small Infrastructure: If you have minimal infrastructure SUSE Rancher’s benefits may not be fully unlocked.

Orchestrating your containerised micro-services with ease

Rating: 6 out of 10
Incentivized
June 25, 2024
Verified User
Consultant in Engineering
Internet Company, 1-10 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
5 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use SUSE Rancher within our organisation to orchestrate Docker containers across a number of micro services. SUSE Rancher is great for managing connectivity between different components, and connecting multiple nodes together running these services. We have been using SUSE Rancher since v1 to run 100s of containers and workloads, from dev, test to production environments.
Pros
  • Orchestration
  • Security
  • Easy to manage
Cons
  • Setup process of SUSE Rancher v2 much more complex than v1
  • Less suited to small organisations
  • Steep learning curve
Likelihood to Recommend
SUSE Rancher is great for quickly deploying containerised workloads, version 2 of SUSE Rancher branched deeper into the Kubernetes ecosystem which has made the tool more powerful, with the slight drawback of increased learning curve for those less familiar with K8s. SUSE Rancher comes into its own when running a number of workloads and nodes and may be less suited to running more monolithic workloads.

Rancher - Kubernetes-based platforms reimagined

Rating: 10 out of 10
February 13, 2024
SM
Szymon Madej
DevOps Architect for Containerization Platforms and Microservices
PZU (Insurance, 10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
2 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We are using Rancher at corporate scale: multiple cluster, tens of projects, 300 Namespaces, 500 applications developers and administrators, thousands of Business users and clients etc. Rancher is used to maintain multiple very similar to each other Kubernetes clusters, within two main environments (non-production and production).Time not consumed by repetetive Day-2 operations, we can spent on developing new functionalites of our Rancher-based platforms. Most important ROI for Business is single platform for all business applications that are built as microservices. That provides shorter time-to-market factor, and SPoC and SPoK (K as Knowledge) for applications developers.
Pros
  • Public and private cloud infrastructure providers based on K8s CAPI
  • REST API that can be used to integrate company services with Rancher
  • GUI that is easy to learn and use in daily operations
  • Builtin GitOps automation solution based on Fleet project
  • It is fully open source
Cons
  • Airgap installations can be hard and demanding
  • Still waiting for Project 2.0 feature with support of hierarchical Namespaces
  • Speed of development of new functionalites is uneven
Likelihood to Recommend
Rancher best suits for installation at scale. There is no difference if you need a few very large clusters, or dozens or hundreds of tiny one. It helps to simplify repetetive Day-2 operations and maintenance or administrative tasks.In other hand Rancher is easy to install and hard to master. Learning by doing in Rancher is effective and very interesting, but takes a lot of time, so in small and simple environments it will not generate high ROI.

Orchestrate Kubernetes everywhere

Rating: 8 out of 10
September 18, 2023
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology
Automotive Company, 10,001+ employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use SUSE Rancher as our central tool for orchestrating our Kubernetes landscape to enable standarization, governance, lifecycle managment and visibility.
By using SUSE Rancher we will get support for our Kubernetes landscape, which is no possible by just using open source, and reduce the complexitiy of setting up Kubernetes clusters.
We started with on-premise and extended to AWS EKS and plan to also add Azure AKS in future.
Pros
  • Easy rollout of Kubernetes Clusters
  • Multi-Tenancy
  • Container deployment via Helm
Cons
  • Connection to cloud providers could be easier
  • The documentation could be more comprehensible
  • It would be nice to have best practices for the setup
Likelihood to Recommend
Rancher is perfect if you have to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters, especially if you have to provide them for different teams with their own access rights and requirements. With Rancher we can provide such clusters on-premise, even in different sites, and in the cloud on different hyperscalers.
If you only have to manage one or some few Kubernetes clusters, it would surely be too much overhead to use Rancher.

Rancher

Rating: 8 out of 10
September 15, 2023
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Non-profit Organization Management Company, 1001-5000 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
3 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We need to run our Kubernetes-Clusters in an Air-Gapped environment and need the opportunity to manage all these clusters and also append new ones in short time.
Pros
  • Deploy new clusters out of Rancher in minutes
  • Manage all clusters with one tool
  • Fleet integration
  • Supports Air-Gapped environments
Cons
  • Releases should be more stable
Likelihood to Recommend
Originally we came from SUSE CaaSP and were "forced" into Rancher. In retrospect, this was a good decision, Rancher comes with everything we need and - if we exclude the last releases (e.g. 2.7.5) - it's pretty stable too. With the fleet integration, we can pretty much deploy a new cluster with all managed services we provide we just a few clicks.

SUSE Rancher: Perfect Tool for Kubernetes Management

Rating: 9 out of 10
May 29, 2023
AR
Aman Rawal
Senior Software Engineer
Web Bakers (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We work with multiple clients and by the time we have multiple cluster hosted on multiple cloud platforms. It's very difficult to manage all those cluster manually or through cli tools. With Rancher we can easily create, upgrade and delete clusters in almost all the major cloud platform. One of the major issue was managing users and monitoring the cluster, Rancher helps us in that as well.
Pros
  • Cluster management
  • Cluster Monitoring
  • User Management
  • Backup
Cons
  • Support for EKS Fargate is not available
  • GitOps tool need some improvement
Likelihood to Recommend
I will highly recommend Rancher to companies or individuals working on multiple Kubernetes clusters. Rancher will help in easily creating and upgrading the clusters. you can easily setup production grade monitoring by just one click with Prometheus and Grafana. You can also create users with fine grain permissions to protect your cluster from un-authorised access.

Review for Suse Rancher

Rating: 10 out of 10
April 20, 2023
SS
Saikat Saha
Infra Architect
Cognizant (Information Technology & Services, 10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
2 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I am using Suse Rancher to manage Kubernetes system. This has a good Graphical user interface to Manage the Kubernetes Cluster. We are using the cloud environment for our Kubernetes configuration. It is good to have Rancher product which are easy to manage the Kubernetes solution. We have some web base application hosted on Kubernetes cluster & this is managed by Suse Rancher.
Pros
  • Easy to Mange Kubernetes cluster Using Suse Rancher GUI
  • No need to know all type of Kubernetes command while using Suse Rancher GUI
  • Easy to upgrade the Kubernetes Version
Cons
  • Some more features need to add in Kubernetes cluster configuration
  • Support should be improved
  • Production documentation should be more user friendly
Likelihood to Recommend
In case of Container management, It is recommended to use Suse Rancher. It is good to use this in cloud environment. It is easy to manage there. It is not recommended to use in the on-premises environment. We have mnay limited use cases for the on-premises environment for Suse Rancher.

Gather Up Your Cloud Cattle with Rancher

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized
February 24, 2022
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Customers of Datalounges build, maintain and manage cloud native applications on a variety of Kubernetes platforms. Often these are provided by hyper scalers such as Google and AmazonWeb Services. A small environment is easy for customers to keep under control, but as the use cases start varying and requirements for security, configuration management and more common ops-related problems arise, SUSE Rancher is introduced to the equation to maintain those platforms. Key use cases may include controlled delivery of apps from a trusted source and then their lifecycle or controlling the configurations of the Kubernetes environments to keep them similar enough over their lifecycle. Mainly it is a scaling thing though. Rancher provides a good basis for skilled engineers to automate and those with less experience to administrate in scale.
Pros
  • Manages users and access.
  • Maintains Kubernetes configurations.
  • Provides admin visibility to cluster health.
Cons
  • Self-service of developers needs either tooling or improvement
  • The observability-like elastic component is not flexible to fit into the rest of the stack
  • Fleet GitOps functionality could use improvement to compete with leading vendors
Likelihood to Recommend
SUSE Rancher as a management tool becomes useful on a larger scale. Small deployments not so much. If someone also requires Kubernetes capacity or storage, Rancher is an excellent choice. Also, without Kubernetes' skills, it is unlikely that Rancher deployment is going to be a success. Then again if someone else is managing your Kubernetes capacity, setting up the software's capacity will yield greater control. Rancher is not a very integrated solution similar to others in the market.

Managing and controlling your Kubernetes cluster in a simple way

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 09, 2022
JM
Jose Manuel Ortega
Software Engineer
UA - Universidad de Alicante / Universitat d'Alacant (E-Learning, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
1 year of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
The main use of SUSE Rancher has been to easily manage different Kubernetes clusters using different environments. One of the main advantages provided by this solution is its interoperability with different environments and cloud providers so that deployments are executed in a faster and more controlled way. In addition, thanks to the possibilities offered at the cluster management level, the process of adding high availability to the applications that are running are facilitated.
Pros
  • Managing a Kubernetes cluster in a simple way.
  • Interoperability with different cloud providers.
  • Save time and resources by further simplifying Kubernetes deployments.
  • Intuitive user interface for the end user.
Cons
  • Integration with CI/CD systems.
  • The update process.
Likelihood to Recommend
The best scenario to use SUSE Rancher is where we need to manage the lifecycle of applications hosted on one or more Kubernetes clusters hosted by cloud providers using solutions like Amazon EKS, Microsoft AKS, and Google GKE. Other possible scenarios are where users with multi-cloud environments can now easily manage, secure and operate their clusters hosted within SUSE Rancher.

Using Rancher as Kubernetes Dashboard and Cluster Management for Developers

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
March 30, 2022
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We needed a web dashboard software for our AWS EKS development clusters on Kubernetes with granular user access connected to our SSO and as we had been using in the past Rancher 1 successfully in pre-Kubernetes days it was good to investigate the new Rancher completely built for Kubernetes. The tool is invaluable and the user interface is so easy that also our more technically minded Product Managers can use it. It also unifies authentication for command-line access for kubectl and provides its own command-line tool for developers who prefer not to use the web interface.
Pros
  • Unified kubectl Authentication with SSO across clouds
  • rancher CLI for developers and integration in CI/CD
  • Easy web UI to access pod logs and modify images used
Cons
  • Deeper integration with Kubernetes Cluster API to allow upgrading clusters
  • Integration with Rancher Desktop to promote workloads
Likelihood to Recommend
When managing multiple development clusters it's extremely useful, especially with multiple cloud providers. We haven't used it for cloud production workloads yet where security assessment to match certifications is required and cloud operations should assess if they find it as useful as developers do.

Rancher - A Comprehensive Kubernetes Platform

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
February 17, 2022
AB
Ajinkya Bapat
DevOps Consultant
Infogain (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
3 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use SUSE Rancher in our organization for managing our Production environment which consists of multiple K8s Clusters. We also use Rancher to set up our clusters in multi-cloud environments like GCP/AWS. We do user authentication & authorization via Rancher's support for AD & LDAP. We also use Rancher Desktop for for a simplistic way of looking into our prod environment.
Pros
  • Kubernetes Cluster Management
  • RBAC Assignments
  • Act as a GUI in-front of K8s
Cons
  • Documentation could be improved.
  • No ability to see, edit and manage CRDs from the GUI.
  • Integration documents
Likelihood to Recommend
Rancher is best suited for: multi-cloud deployments, fleet management, integration with Git-Ops toolchain, stable release channels, better visibility into cluster through UI Multi-cluster monitoring, RBAC & Authentication with AD & LDAP, simplicity with which we are able to update multi-node clusters, RKE2 & no dependency on Docker, and no vendor lock-in.

SUSE Rancher is all you need to run Kubernetes

Rating: 10 out of 10
July 27, 2022
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 1001-5000 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
4 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use SUSE Rancher to run Kubernetes production workloads.
We chose Rancher because:
+) It's easy to manage users and their permissions.
+) It's the most complete Kubernetes GUI on the market.
+) Developers don't need to know kubectl cli and Kubernetes YAML syntax to start deploying workblows.
+) It's very easy to upgrade Kubernetes versions with just a few mouse clicks.
Pros
  • User permissions
  • Kubernetes version upgrades
  • The most complete Kubernetes GUI on the market
Cons
  • No possibility to snapshot Projects. You can snapshot and restore the whole Kubernetes cluster, but not a Project or Namespace. For this, you have to use external tools.
  • You cannot detach the Rancher-created Kubernetes clusters from Rancher management.
Likelihood to Recommend
SUSE Rancher is well suited if you want a stable system to start fast Kubernetes adoption. You can learn a long time, you don't need to be a Kubernetes expert in the beginning. I would like to be able to backup Rancher namespaces and projects. Now it's possible to backup only whole clusters.

SUSE Rancher review

Rating: 9 out of 10
March 17, 2022
Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 501-1000 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use SUSE Rancher to help us with the management of Kubernetes clusters and the management of our containers in several environments.
Pros
  • Management of cluster
  • Monitoring of clusters
  • AD integration
  • Ease of use
Cons
  • The GUI is lite confusing
Likelihood to Recommend
SUSE Rancher is suited in the must environments.

Open Source K8s Management Solution - Great for Bare Metal Installations

Rating: 10 out of 10
March 14, 2022
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 10,001+ employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We started using SUSE Rancher to manage K8s clusters on bare metal. In the beginning, we mainly use it to deploy and upgrade new clusters. Then we noticed that the UI is a great feature to bring K8s to the customers. The UI gives you an easily understandable overview of all of your managed clusters. We didn’t find that feature with other software.
Pros
  • Management of multiple clusters in multiple environments
  • Simple to use dashboard
  • Deployment of new clusters on bare metal
Cons
  • Integrated CI/CD (Fleet) is hard to use
Likelihood to Recommend
Using Rancher in combination with Vsphere or Harvester provides almost the same comfortable user experience on bare metal as other big cloud provider solutions. Also, SUSE Rancher makes the complete lifecycle of K8s very simple. It's a lean management solution compared to others if you just use Kubernetes and not a full-blown-up container platform with all the bells and whistles you probably don’t need.

Round'em up!

Rating: 9 out of 10
January 24, 2022
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Financial Services Company, 11-50 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We have two installations of Rancher (prod and non-prod). each rancher instance manages multiple clusters. We are using rancher to better enable users to interact with the clusters, get visual interactions for quicker understanding, and lower the barrier to adoption of the Kubernetes ecosystem. Our Kubernetes clusters and self-managed, and run on k3s. Rancher - fleet (which comes as part of the rancher installation) enables our deployments to follow the Gitops system. Deployments are managed by the feature teams, with versioning and audit of releases done via git. The ability to scale workloads, and get new developers to adopt is so much easier than having to upscale knowledge of CLI tools.
Pros
  • simplify the visualisations and relations of Kubernetes
  • lots of documentation / videos / slack channel
  • stable releases are prod ready, works as advertised
Cons
  • the ui updates sometimes fail and hard refresh is required
  • fall over / restart can be slow (room for improvement)
  • SSO for rancher is limited
Likelihood to Recommend
rancher is great for managing multiple clusters. in a prod environment, it is recommended to have a dedicated cluster for ranchers. The downside of managing a small cluster that changes rarely is there is a significant overhead to manage ranchers in a smaller setup. Rancher is designed to manage multi clusters. and does so efficiently.

Worth the effort to set up

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 03, 2022
Verified User
Director in Information Technology
Education Management Company, 501-1000 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We currently use SUSE Rancher as a consolidated service for our Kubernetes developmental endeavors. We're relatively new to the platform so have been experimenting using it as a head piece for many of our existing systems. The more we become familiar with the functionality, the more we see opportunities to integrate our existing solutions and make them even better and easier to maintain.
Pros
  • Automates processes
  • Centralized security
  • Makes provisioning easier
Cons
  • Sometimes encounter logging bugs
  • Metadata connection troubleshooting
  • Meeting deployment requirements
Likelihood to Recommend
SUSE Rancher is an excellent platform to automate and secure your Kubernetes implementations from a central management platform. Thank goodness the SUSE Rancher community gives many examples and helps to get you on your way with the setup. If you don't have a handle on how Kubernetes works, let alone multiple installations, this probably would be overkill and you could stay simple until you're ready to grow.

Choose SUSE Rancher and be happy

Rating: 9 out of 10
January 25, 2022
Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 51-200 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
SUSE Rancher
3 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use SUSE Rancher to help us and others with the management of Kubernetes clusters and the management of containers. The UI gives a great overview of all clusters/software components--right now a unique feature. CLI is for more complex scenarios (really, really helpful)--especially when it comes to integration into existing environments/clouds.
Pros
  • Great UI
  • Multiple clusters into one dashboard
  • Deployment of a new cluster
  • Update/upgrade
Cons
  • CI/CD
Likelihood to Recommend
It provides a complete lifecycle for containers in bare-metal or cloud environments.
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