Open Source K8s Management Solution - Great for Bare Metal Installations
Updated March 14, 2022

Open Source K8s Management Solution - Great for Bare Metal Installations

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Rancher

Modules Used

  • Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE)
  • Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2 (RKE2)
  • Harvester

Overall Satisfaction with SUSE Rancher

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.
  • Management of multiple clusters in multiple environments
  • Simple to use dashboard
  • Deployment of new clusters on bare metal
  • Integrated CI/CD (Fleet) is hard to use
  • Multicluster management through one entrypoint
  • Integration with authentication services like LDAP or FreeIPA
  • Integration with cloud providers
  • Saving time needed for deployment by using templates
  • Saving a lot of time when upgrading K8s to newer versions
We were looking for an open-source solution for simply deploying and managing K8s on bare metal in both big and small environments. SUSE Rancher was the easiest to install. Rancher Kubernetes Engine (2) and K3s will give you just a plain simple Kubernetes environment. The other software solutions we looked into were restricted and only ran on certain operating systems or had a whole new platform with tools we didn't need.

Do you think SUSE Rancher delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SUSE Rancher's feature set?

Yes

Did SUSE Rancher live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SUSE Rancher go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SUSE Rancher again?

Yes

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.