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Deploying with the Rancher GUI

Condenser consists of several Harvester clusters. Harvester runs on Kubernetes; therefore each cluster is a specialized Kubernetes cluster. Rancher is used to control access to the clusters, and provides a GUI which is accessible within the UCL network.

This tutorial demonstrates how to use the GUI to launch a VM on Condenser which is accessible by SSH.

  1. Enable the UCL VPN
  2. Navigate to the Rancher GUI for Condenser: https://rancher.condenser.arc.ucl.ac.uk
  3. Click on Log in with AzureAD to log in with your UCL credentials
  4. Begin at the Home page: https://rancher.condenser.arc.ucl.ac.uk/dashboard/home
  5. Open the navigation at left (≡) and click on Virtualization Management under Global Apps
  6. From the list of Harvester clusters, click on the name of the cluster you wish to access, e.g. sl-p01

Register your SSH key

  1. On your local computer, generate a SSH key pair if you do not already have one with a passphrase
  2. Copy the contents of your public key onto your clipboard
  3. In the Rancher GUI, from the menu at left, select Advanced > SSH Keys
  4. On the SSH Keys page, click on Create in the upper right
  5. Select your tenancy namespace
  6. Enter an appropriate name for your SSH key
  7. Paste the contents of your public key into the text box under Basics
  8. Click Create in the lower right to register the SSH key

Launch a Virtual Machine

  1. From the menu at left, select Virtual Machines
  2. Click Create in the upper right
  3. Select your tenancy namespace
  4. Name the VM (e.g., demo)
  5. In the VM submenu, select Networks
  6. From the Network drop-down menu, select your tenancy network
  7. In the VM submenu, select Volumes
  8. Select the appropriate image (e.g., harvester-public/almalinux-9.4-20240805)
  9. Increase the Size to 50 GB
  10. In the VM submenu, select Basics
  11. Increase the CPU setting to 2
  12. Increase the Memory to 8 GiB
  13. Select your SSH Key

  14. Click Create in the lower right to launch the VM

    Note

    Occasionally the VM creation form will clear entries even though they appear to have been properly configured. This will cause errors to appear when you click Create. Re-enter them, wait for the Create button to reappear, and try again. It sometimes helps to focus the cursor out of the form fields after you configure a setting.

Save a VM configuration as a template

  1. From the menu at left, select Virtual Machines
  2. Tick the box next to the VM
  3. From the menu at right (⋮), select Generate Template
  4. Name the template
  5. To launch a VM from a template, in the VM creation form tick the Use VM Template box and select the appropriate template

Log in to the VM with SSH

  1. From the menu at left, select Virtual Machines
  2. Identify the VM that you just launched in the list
  3. Wait for the IP address to appear, then copy it. The IP address will begin with 10.134.
  4. Follow these instructions to access the VM with SSH. For VMs created from an Almalinux image, the username will be almalinux.

Change a VM's state

  1. From the menu at left, select Virtual Machines
  2. Tick the box next to the VM
  3. Click Stop, Restart, Start, or Delete at the top of the table of VMs