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Managing Server Roles

By default, starting the RKE2 will run all control-plane components, including the apiserver, controller-manager, scheduler, and etcd. It is possible to disable specific components in order to split the control-plane and etcd roles on to separate nodes.

Dedicated etcd Nodes​

To create a server with only the etcd role, deploy a config with all the control-plane components disabled:

# /etc/rancher/rke2/config.yaml
disable-apiserver: true
disable-controller-manager: true
disable-scheduler: true

This first node will start etcd, and wait for additional etcd and/or control-plane nodes to join. The cluster will not be usable until you join an additional server with the control-plane components enabled.

Dedicated control-plane Nodes​

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A dedicated control-plane node cannot be the first server in the cluster; there must be an existing node with the etcd role before joining dedicated control-plane nodes.

To create a server with only the control-plane role, deploy a config with etcd disabled:

# /etc/rancher/rke2/config.yaml
server: https://<etcd-only-node>:9345
disable-etcd: true

After creating dedicated server nodes, the selected roles will be visible in kubectl get node:

$ kubectl get nodes
NAME           STATUS   ROLES                       AGE     VERSION
rke2-server-1   Ready    etcd                        5h39m   v1.26.4+rke2r1
rke2-server-2   Ready    control-plane,master        5h39m   v1.26.4+rke2r1

Adding Roles To Existing Servers​

Roles can be added to existing dedicated nodes by restarting RKE2 with the disable flags removed. For example, if you want to add the control-plane role to a dedicated etcd node, you can remove the disable-apiserver disable-controller-manager disable-scheduler lines from the config file, and restart the service.