When RancherD is upgraded, the Rancher Helm controller and the Fleet pods are upgraded.

    During a RancherD upgrade, there is very little downtime, but it is possible that RKE2 may be down for a minute, during which you could lose access to Rancher.

    When Rancher is installed with RancherD, the underlying Kubernetes cluster can’t be upgraded from the Rancher UI. It needs to be upgraded using the RancherD CLI.

    To upgrade Rancher without upgrading the underlying Kubernetes cluster, follow these steps.

    1. Reinstall the Rancher chart with Helm. To install a specific Rancher version, use the flag. For example:

    Result: Rancher is upgraded to the new version.

    If necessary, restore Rancher from backup by following these steps.

    Upgrading Both Rancher and the Underlying Cluster

    To specify a specific version to upgrade to, use INSTALL_RANCHERD_VERSION environment variable:

    Then launch the server:

    The upgrade can also be performed by manually installing the binary of the desired version.