Cluster Administration

After you provision a cluster in Rancher, you can begin using powerful Kubernetes features to deploy and scale your containerized applications in development, testing, or production environments.

This page covers the following topics:

• Switching between clusters
• Managing clusters in Rancher
• Configuring tools

This section assumes a basic familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes. For a brief explanation of how Kubernetes components work together, refer to the concepts page.

Switching between Clusters

To switch between clusters, use the drop-down available in the navigation bar.

Alternatively, you can switch between projects and clusters directly in the navigation bar. Open the Global view and select Clusters from the main menu. Then select the name of the cluster you want to open.

Managing Clusters in Rancher

After clusters have been provisioned into Rancher, cluster owners will need to manage these clusters. There are many different options of how to manage your cluster.

Action	Rancher launched Kubernetes Clusters	Hosted Kubernetes Clusters	Imported Clusters
Using kubectl and a kubeconfig file to Access a Cluster	✓	✓	✓
Managing Cluster Members	✓	✓	✓
Editing and Upgrading Clusters	✓	✓	*
Managing Nodes	✓	✓	✓
Managing Persistent Volumes and Storage Classes	✓	✓	✓
Managing Projects, Namespaces and Workloads	✓	✓	✓
Using App Catalogs	✓	✓	✓
Configuring Tools (Alerts, Notifiers, Logging, Monitoring, Istio)	✓	✓	✓
Cloning Clusters	✓	✓
Ability to rotate certificates	✓
Ability to back up your Kubernetes Clusters	✓
Ability to recover and restore etcd	✓
Cleaning Kubernetes components when clusters are no longer reachable from Rancher	✓
Configuring Pod Security Policies	✓
Running Security Scans	✓
Authorized Cluster Endpoint	✓

* Cluster configuration options can't be edited for imported clusters, except for K3s clusters.

Configuring Tools

Rancher contains a variety of tools that aren't included in Kubernetes to assist in your DevOps operations. Rancher can integrate with external services to help your clusters run more efficiently. Tools are divided into following categories:

• Alerts
• Notifiers
• Logging
• Monitoring
• Istio Service Mesh
• OPA Gatekeeper

For more information, see Tools