Adding Exoscale Hosts


Rancher supports provisioning Exoscale hosts using docker machine.

Finding Exoscale Credentials

In order to launch an Exoscale host, you’ll need your API Key and Secret Key provided by Exoscale. Log in to your Exoscale account. Navigate to the API Keys tab located in your Profile.

Launching Exoscale Host(s)

Now that we’ve found our API Key and Secret Key, we are ready to launch our Exoscale host(s). Under the Infrastructure -> Hosts tab, click Add Host. Select the Exoscale icon. Provide your Exoscale API Key and Secret Key, click on Next: Authenticate & select a Security Group.

Next, you’ll select a security group to use for the hosts. There are two choices for security groups. The Standard option will create or use the existing rancher-machine security group. If Rancher creates the rancher-machine security group, it will open up all the necessary ports to allow Rancher to work successfully. docker machine will automatically open up port 2376, which is the Docker daemon port.

In the Custom option, you can choose an existing security group, but you will need to ensure that specific ports are open in order for Rancher to be working correctly.

Required Ports for Rancher to work:

  • From the rancher server to TCP port 22 (SSH to install and configure Docker) and TCP port 2376 (access to Docker daemon)
  • If you are using the IPsec networking driver, from and to all other hosts on UDP ports 500 and 4500
  • If you are using the VXLAN networking driver, from and to all other hosts on UDP ports 4789

Note: If you re-use the rancher-machine security group, any missing ports in the security group will not be re-opened. You will need to check the security group in Exoscale if the host does not launch correctly.

After choosing your security option, click on Next: Set Instance Options.

Finally, you’ll just need to finish filling out the final details of the host(s).

  1. Select the number of hosts you want to launch using the slider.
  2. Provide a Name and if desired, Description for the host.
  3. Select the Instance Profile.
  4. Select the Root Size, which is the Exoscale disk size.
  5. (Optional) Add labels to hosts to help organize your hosts and to schedule services/load balancers or to program external DNS records using an IP other than the host IP.
  6. (Optional) Customize your docker-machine create command with Docker engine options.
  7. When complete, click Create.

Note: Currently, not all options in docker machine are exposed in the UI for Exoscale. We use the default Exoscale endpoint (i.e. https://api.exoscale.ch/compute), image (i.e. ubuntu-14.04), and availability zone (i.e. ch-gva-2).

Once you click on create, Rancher will create the Exoscale instance and launch the rancher-agent container in the instance. In a couple of minutes, the host will be active and available for services.