Rancher upgrade FAQ

This document (000020727) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

As of writing this article, there are now two main branches that we will be working on. When you navigate to the rancher/rancher GitHub, you will see two branches: the latest branch and the stable branch. These two branches are now different, and when upgrading Rancher, we recommend using the stable branch as our team has not verified and certified the latest branch.

Situation

As we near the end of maintenance, end of life, and end of support for Rancher 2.6, we felt it pertinent to provide a one-stop FAQ page as customers begin to plan their upgrades.

All upgrades should go from the latest to the latest. For instance, if you are on 2.6.10, you should go to 2.6.newest-stable and then to 2.7.newest-stable. The stop on 2.6.newest-stable should be about a week to ensure you can catch any issues before moving forward.

After the upgrade to 2.7.newest-stable, you should then upgrade the underlying Kubernetes version to the latest supported version of the Rancher release. And again, the new Kubernetes version should be tested and verified for around one week. From there, progress to the next Rancher upgrade, test, and then Kubernetes.

Many customers ask why we recommend one week. The 1-week recommendation is because this is often enough time for your clusters and app to be thoroughly tested and any issues flagged. We have seen customers who do less of a testing phase and only find issues when their cluster is being fully used and under normal "strain."

Here are some useful links for upgrades — see link (1) below for our team's general best practices around upgrade paths.

During the course of your upgrade, see link (2) for how you and your team can bump the severity of this case if there is an impacting event during your upgrade. Doing so will notify our on-call engineer, who will engage as quickly as possible.

Please review link (3) to verify that the Rancher and Kubernetes versions remain inline. It is best to ensure that any testing is done in a lower environment first so that you and your team can be more aware of any issues that the version jumps could have on your environment and applications.

Lastly, for our team to better understand the updated environment, would you please run our system support script (4). This script will give our team a better understanding of the upgraded environment and the ability to call out items that may be out of our best practices.

(1)https://www.suse.com/support/kb/doc/?id=000020061
(2)https://www.suse.com/support/kb/doc/?id=000020296
(3)https://www.suse.com/suse-rancher/support-matrix/all-supported-versions/
(4)https://www.suse.com/support/kb/doc/?id=000020192

Disclaimer

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