Rancher

Rancher is the cloud VM platform used by LSIT. Access is controlled by NetID login -- contact LSIT support to be added. Math's namespaces are "math" and "math-webwork".

Management

The management console is at http://rancher.lsit.ucsb.edu.

1. Click "VM Management" on the right side.
2. Click the "compute-lsit" cluster.
3. Click "Virtual Machines" on the left.

Basic VM configuration

Most of it is pretty self-explanatory, but a few things to keep in mind when creating new VMs:

• Don't forget to select an SSH keypair on the "Basics" page.
• Under "Volumes," make sure you select an OS image for the root volume. "math/ubuntu-server-noble" will give you an Ubuntu 24LTS installation.
• Under "Networks," select "harvester-public/vlan-2176" as the network, and "bridge" as the type.
• Under "Instance labels," whatever you set for "harvesterhci.io/vmName" will be picked up by Ubuntu as the hostname.

Network configuration

The VM will receive an IP address from LSIT's DHCP server. To request a static IP, file a ticket with LSIT giving the instance's MAC address (available from the "Networks" page of the VM's details, after launching it, or of course from inside the VM itself.)

The VM's IP address mapping is direct, there's no NAT layer.

Images

Any raw or qcow2 image can be uploaded (or pulled in from a URL). Other formats may work if converted first -- e.g. you can convert a VirtualBox vmdk image to qcow2 with a command like:

qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 disk1.vmdk disk1.qcow2