The following instructions will guide you through upgrading a high-availability Rancher Server that was installed using Helm package manager.

Note: If you installed Rancher using the RKE Add-on yaml, see the following documents to migrate or upgrade.

• Migrating from RKE Add-On Install

  As of release v2.0.8, Rancher supports installation and upgrade by Helm chart, although RKE installs/upgrades are still supported as well. If you want to change upgrade method from RKE Add-on to Helm chart, follow this procedure.

Prerequisites

• Backup your Rancher cluster

  Take a one-time snapshot of your Rancher Server cluster. You'll use the snapshot as a restoration point if something goes wrong during upgrade.

• kubectl

  Follow the kubectl configuration instructions and confirm that you can connect to the Kubernetes cluster running Rancher server.

• Helm

  Install or update Helm to the latest version.

• Tiller

  Update the helm agent, Tiller, on your cluster.

  helm init --upgrade --service-account tiller - Upgrades to v2.0.7+ only: check system namespace locations Starting in v2.0.7, Rancher introduced the System project, which is a project that's automatically created to store important namespaces that Kubernetes needs to operate. During upgrade to v2.0.7+, Rancher expects these namespaces to be unassigned from all projects. Before beginning upgrade, check your system namespaces to make sure that they're unassigned to prevent cluster networking issues.

Upgrade Rancher

Note: For Air Gap installs see Upgrading HA Rancher - Air Gap

1. Update your local helm repo cache.

   helm repo update

2. Get the repository name that you used to install Rancher.

   For information about the repos and their differences, see Helm Chart Repositories.

   ``` helm repo list

   NAME URL stable https://kubernetes-charts.storage.googleapis.com rancher- https://releases.rancher.com/server-charts/ ```

   Note: If you want to switch to a different Helm chart repository, please follow the steps on how to switch repositories. If you switch repositories, make sure to list the repositories again before continuing onto Step 3 to ensure you have the correct one added.

3. Get the set values from the current Rancher install.

   ``` helm get values rancher

   hostname: rancher.my.org ```

   Note: There may be more values that are listed with this command depending on which SSL configuration option you selected when installing Rancher.

4. Upgrade Rancher to the latest version based on values from the previous steps.

   • Replace <CHART_REPO> with the repository that was listed (i.e. latest or stable).
   • Take all the values from the previous step and append them to the command using --set key=value.

   helm upgrade rancher rancher-<CHART_REPO>/rancher --set hostname=rancher.my.org

Result: Rancher is upgraded. Log back into Rancher to confirm that the upgrade succeeded.

Having Network Issues Following Upgrade?

See Restoring Cluster Networking.

Rolling Back

Should something go wrong, follow the HA Rollback instructions to restore the snapshot you took before you preformed the upgrade.