How I Set Up My RKE2 Cluster with Loadbalancer, Ingress Controller, Ingress Resource, TLS, and Persistent Storage

In this post, I’ll walk you through the steps I took to set up my RKE2 Kubernetes cluster, configure MetalLB as a load balancer, utilize the Nginx Ingress Controller to route traffic to multiple services, such as Grafana and Nginx, and manage persistent storage using Persistent Volumes (PVs) and Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs).

This was done in a test environment with:

• 1 Master node
• 2 Worker nodes
• Your Custom domain: sanjaymaharjann.com.np
• Services exposed via Ingress resource:
• Grafana → grafana.sanjaymaharjann.com.np
• Harbor (or NGINX test pod) → harbor.sanjaymaharjann.com.np or nginx.sanjaymaharjann.com.np
• MetalLB: Assign an IP address to the services of type loadbalancer.

Let’s dive in!
Prerequisites: Before we begin, ensure you have the following ready:

1. RKE2 Cluster [One master, two worker nodes]
2. kubectl [Configured to access your cluster]
3. Domain [A custom domain like sanjaymaharjann.com.np]
4. TLS Certificate [Wildcard cert (*.sanjaymaharjann.com.np)]
5. DNS Provider [To point subdomains to Ingress IP or, in my case, localhost DNS resolver.]
6. MetalLB [For LoadBalancer support and a subnet of your custom network.]

*Step 1: Install RKE2 Cluster *

I started by installing RKE2 using Rancher's official documentation[https://docs.rke2.io/install/methods].

After setting up the control plane and joining the worker nodes, I verified everything was running:

root@master:~# kubectl get nodes
NAME     STATUS   ROLES                       AGE   VERSION
agent1   Ready    <none>                      20d   v1.31.8+rke2r1
agent2   Ready    <none>                      20d   v1.31.8+rke2r1
master   Ready    control-plane,etcd,master   20d   v1.31.8+rke2r1
root@master:~# hostname
master
root@master:~#

✅ All nodes are up and healthy.

*Step 2: Installation of MetalLB *
Since this is a bare-metal setup, I used MetalLB as my LoadBalancer provider.

kubectl create namespace metallb-system
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.13.10/config/manifests/metallb-native.yaml
root@master:~# kubectl get pods -n metallb-system
NAME                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
controller-5456bd6d98-vwd6j   1/1     Running   0          15d
speaker-429lj                 1/1     Running   0          15d
speaker-7pzgf                 1/1     Running   0          15d
speaker-ww8r2                 1/1     Running   0          15d

Create a config file for the metallb configuration to advertise the IP pool. Simply, create a file metallb-config.yaml and paste the contents as:

# metallb-config.yaml

apiVersion: metallb.io/v1beta1
kind: IPAddressPool
metadata:
  name: my-ip-pool
  namespace: metallb-system
spec:
  addresses:
    - 10.0.2.240-10.0.2.250

---
apiVersion: metallb.io/v1beta1
kind: L2Advertisement
metadata:
  name: l2adv
  namespace: metallb-system
spec:
  ipAddressPools:
    - my-ip-pool

Apply it with:

kubectl apply -f metallb-config.yaml
root@master:~/metallb# kubectl get pods -n metallb-system -o wide
NAME                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE   IP           NODE     NOMINATED NODE   READINESS GATES
controller-5456bd6d98-vwd6j   1/1     Running   0          15d   10.42.1.35   agent1   <none>           <none>
speaker-429lj                 1/1     Running   0          15d   10.0.2.109   master   <none>           <none>
speaker-7pzgf                 1/1     Running   0          15d   10.0.2.112   agent2   <none>           <none>
speaker-ww8r2                 1/1     Running   0          15d   10.0.2.111   agent1   <none>           <none>
root@master:~/metallb# kubectl get l2advertisement -n metallb-system
NAME    IPADDRESSPOOLS   IPADDRESSPOOL SELECTORS   INTERFACES
l2adv   ["my-ip-pool"]
root@master:~/metallb#  kubectl get ipaddresspool -n metallb-system
NAME         AUTO ASSIGN   AVOID BUGGY IPS   ADDRESSES
my-ip-pool   true          false             ["10.0.2.240-10.0.2.250"]