Rancher on bare metal: everything you need to know

More and more organizations are discovering that running containers exclusively in public cloud environments creates problems that bare metal Kubernetes deployments can solve. 

When you combine Rancher with bare metal servers, you get complete control, predictable performance, and significantly lower operational costs, benefits that cloud platforms often struggle to deliver.

Managing bare metal Kubernetes clusters comes with challenges, sure, but Rancher transforms what could be a management nightmare into something surprisingly manageable. 

And when it comes to bare metal, many organizations see 40-60% reductions in infrastructure costs compared to public cloud alternatives.

This article walks through the key considerations that should guide your decision, focusing on why bare metal Kubernetes with Rancher might be right for your specific situation.

Why Choose Bare Metal for Kubernetes

Bare metal Kubernetes offers distinct advantages when your workloads have specific requirements that cloud environments can't meet effectively:

Performance and Consistency: Direct hardware access eliminates virtualization overhead, providing consistent resource allocation and predictable response times. This becomes crucial for latency-sensitive applications like machine learning training, high-frequency trading, or real-time data processing, where the "noisy neighbor" effect of shared environments is unacceptable.

Cost Efficiency: For predictable, steady workloads, bare metal eliminates the "convenience tax" of cloud services. You maximize hardware utilization by paying for 100% of resources and using 100% of them, with many organizations seeing significant cost reductions over time.

Control and Independence: You avoid vendor lock-in from both cloud providers and proprietary Kubernetes distributions, maintaining complete freedom to make infrastructure changes based on business needs rather than provider limitations.

Security and Compliance: Physical isolation provides a superior security posture for industries with strict regulatory requirements, offering complete visibility into your security stack with customized hardening measures.

How Rancher Simplifies Bare Metal Kubernetes

Rancher tackles the tricky parts of running Kubernetes on bare metal by giving you a unified management platform that keeps you in control without making things more complicated than they need to be.

The biggest win is having everything managed from one place. Instead of juggling separate interfaces for each cluster, you get a single control plane that works across bare metal instances, virtual machines, and other cloud setups. 

This means you can apply the same policies everywhere and spend way less time on admin work as your infra grows—no more logging into different systems or trying to keep track of inconsistent configurations across your infrastructure.

Getting up and running is much simpler thanks to RKE2, which is Rancher's security-first Kubernetes distribution. You can have a proper cluster running in just a few minutes, which beats the old days of spending hours getting everything configured correctly by hand. 

RKE2 works with popular networking options like Calico, Cilium, Multus, and Canal, so you can pick what works best for your setup without worrying about things breaking due to configuration mistakes.

User management becomes a breeze because Rancher integrates seamlessly with your existing systems, such as Active Directory. You don't need to recreate all your user accounts or figure out an entirely new way of controlling who can access what.

Your existing access policies work across users, groups, projects, and clusters, which keeps things consistent and saves you from managing yet another identity system.

Monitoring comes built in through Prometheus integration, so you get visibility into what's happening across all your clusters without having to set up additional tools.

The logging and alerting features provide you with the necessary tools to keep things running smoothly and catch problems before they escalate into major issues.

Key Things to Think About When Deploying

If you're choosing between RKE2 and the original RKE, go with RKE2 unless you have a particular reason not to. It offers better security defaults, is easier to maintain, and is where all the new development is happening. The original RKE is still around if you need it for compatibility reasons, but most people will be happier with RKE2.

You'll also need to decide between custom clusters and provider clusters. If you want complete control over your hardware (which is often the point of going bare metal), custom clusters are the way to go since you're installing Kubernetes directly on your physical servers. 

Provider clusters are more automated, but they limit how much you can control the underlying hardware.

Once you're managing more than just a handful of machines, you'll want to set up node pools. These let you group identical nodes, which makes scaling much easier and means failed nodes can be automatically replaced. 

One last important thing: always run your Rancher management server on its own dedicated hardware, separate from the clusters you're managing. This prevents your management tools from competing with your workloads for resources, and it means that if something goes wrong with one of your clusters, you can still manage everything else without problems.

Important Challenges to Consider

Scaling Limitations: Unlike cloud's instant scaling, bare metal requires careful capacity planning and provisioning for peak workloads, often accepting resource underutilization during normal operations. 

Networking Complexity: You must manually configure load balancers, ingress controllers, DNS management, and service discovery (components that cloud providers typically abstract away).

Backup and Recovery: Comprehensive backup strategies become your responsibility, including regular etcd snapshots and documented recovery procedures that work under pressure.

Security Hardening: You must explicitly configure network policies, authentication mechanisms, certificate rotation, and maintain security throughout the cluster lifecycle.

Making the Decision

Bare metal Kubernetes with Rancher is a strategic choice that should align with your specific requirements, risk tolerance, and long-term objectives. 

The combination delivers predictable performance, enhanced security, and vendor independence that cloud environments can't match, while Rancher streamlines management through centralized control and simplified provisioning.

However, success requires your organization to be ready to handle hardware lifecycle management, networking complexity, disaster recovery, and security hardening—responsibilities that cloud providers typically assume.

The decision becomes clearer when evaluating workload characteristics. While teams running stable, compute-intensive applications or handling sensitive data under compliance requirements will find bare metal particularly compelling, applications requiring rapid elasticity might benefit more from cloud environments despite higher costs.

Many organizations adopt hybrid approaches, running predictable workloads on bare metal while using cloud platforms for variable deployments. Rancher's consistent management across both environments makes this strategy way more practical and sustainable.

Overall, infrastructure choices should serve business objectives rather than follow technology trends, so always match your orchestration complexity precisely to your actual requirements.

Deploy in seconds with Latitude.sh

Latitude.sh offers a mature ecosystem for deploying and operating Kubernetes clusters on bare metal, with a handful of guides to help you get started with your cluster, including:

• RKE2: A secure, CNCF‑certified Kubernetes distribution designed for simplicity and resilience on dedicated servers.

• Longhorn storage: Seamlessly integrates with Kubernetes to provide enterprise-grade, high‑availability block storage using commodity hardware.

• Cilium networking: Leverages eBPF for high-performance, identity‑based policy enforcement and optional kube‑proxy replacement—ideal for bare metal environments.

• MetalLB & Cloudflare: Enable cloud‑style load balancing, BGP support, and global failover, all fitting naturally into self‑hosted bare metal clusters.

Coupling these with supplementary guides, on topics like monitoring with Prometheus/Grafana or TSN-enabled networking for deterministic performance, ensures a production-ready deployment capable of scaling with confidence.

You can check Latitude.sh's right here and sign up for the platform for free here.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the main advantages of running Kubernetes on bare metal? 

Running Kubernetes on bare metal offers improved performance and lower latency, better cost control and hardware utilization, freedom from cloud vendor lock-in, and enhanced security through physical isolation.

How does Rancher simplify Kubernetes management on bare metal? 

Rancher provides centralized cluster management, simplified provisioning with RKE2, integrated user management with role-based access control, and comprehensive multi-cluster monitoring capabilities.

What's the difference between RKE and RKE2 for bare metal deployments? 

RKE2 is a more advanced Kubernetes distribution with security-focused defaults and a smaller footprint. It's CNCF-certified, creates conformant clusters quickly, and is generally easier to maintain and upgrade compared to the original RKE.

What challenges should we expect when deploying Kubernetes on bare metal? 

Key challenges include hardware maintenance and lifecycle management, scaling limitations compared to cloud elasticity, complex networking and DNS setup, comprehensive backup and disaster recovery planning, and ongoing security hardening requirements.

Should we run the Rancher server on the same cluster as our workloads? 

No, it's recommended to run the Rancher server on a dedicated machine separate from the Kubernetes clusters it manages. This separation prevents resource conflicts, isolates the management plane from potential workload issues, and reduces operational risks.