Rancher v2.15.0

Release v2.15.0

[!IMPORTANT]

• If you are using Active Directory Federation Service (AD FS), upgrading to Rancher v2.10.1 or later may cause issues with authentication, requiring manual intervention. These issues are due to the AD FS Relying Party Trust not being able to pick up a signature verification certificate from the metadata. For more information, see #48655. These issues can be corrected by either of two methods:

  • Updating the Relying Party Trust information from federation metadata (Relying Party Trust → Update from Federation Metadata…​).

  • Directly adding the certificate (Relying Party Trust → Properties → Signature tab → Add → Select the certificate).

Rancher v2.15.0 is the latest minor release of Rancher. This is a Community version release that introduces new features, enhancements, and various updates.

What's New - v2.15.0

• Kubernetes Support and Lifecycle Updates

  • Rancher v2.15 adds support for Kubernetes v1.36 while removing support for Kubernetes v1.33.
  • Rancher App Chart Retention Policy: Enforces a new lifecycle policy preserving chart versions in the "Rancher" repository for the 7 most recent minor releases (approx. 2.5 years). Older chart versions have been removed.

• Cluster Provisioning

  • Cluster API (CAPI) GA: Support for native CAPI infrastructure providers within the V2 provisioning framework (v2prov) has been promoted to General Availability (GA).
  • Updated CAPI support to v1.13.2.

• Authentication

  • Inherited Namespace Rules for GlobalRoles: Administrators can now define inheritedNamespacedRules in GlobalRoles to automatically propagate specific namespace RBAC permissions across all downstream clusters.
  • Azure AD SSO Logout: Added support for Single Logout (SLO) with Azure AD, allowing users to terminate their Azure AD session directly upon logging out of Rancher, with support for custom sovereign-cloud endpoints.
  • Hide Local Auth Provider: Introduced a new hide-local-auth-provider feature flag to restrict local UI authentication once an External Authentication Provider (EAP) is configured.

• Dashboard

  • Workloads Overview UI: Replaces the legacy all-in-one Workloads list in the Rancher Dashboard with a high-performance Workloads Overview UI view designed for large-scale environments.

Rancher General

Features and Enhancements

• Rancher now supports Kubernetes v1.36. See #54303 for information on Rancher support for Kubernetes v1.36. You can view the upstream Kubernetes changelog for v1.36 for a complete list of changes.

• Added a cap on the maximum number of public endpoint annotations (field.cattle.io/publicEndpoints) written for Ingress objects. This prevents workloads with extensive custom domain lists from exceeding Kubernetes’ 256 KB metadata annotation size limit and triggering API validation errors. See #42058.

• Optimized rancher-images.txt to include only the latest patch release per Kubernetes minor version compatible with the target Rancher release. Release Candidate (RC) pre-releases and superseded patch/minor versions are now filtered out, significantly reducing the size of air-gapped image tarballs while ensuring system-agent-installer and auxiliary images remain fully up to date. See #46174.

Behavior Changes

• Rancher v2.15 removes support for Kubernetes v1.33. See #55306.

Retention Policy for Rancher App Charts

To improve repository performance, Rancher is introducing a lifecycle management policy for charts available in the Apps feature of Rancher, specifically in the "Rancher" repository.

• The Policy: Rancher will transition from a cumulative model (retaining all historical versions forever) to a retention model that preserves chart versions for the seven (7) most recent Rancher minor releases (approximately a 2.5-year window).

• Timeline - Rancher v2.13 & v2.14: Legacy chart versions (older than the 7-version window) remain available.

• Rancher v2.15: This release is the first version to enforce the policy. Versions falling outside the 7-version window and older than two years will no longer be available.

Impact: This change is non-destructive for existing Rancher installations. Historical versions will remain accessible but will not be available in newer release branches once they age out of the 7-version window. You are advised to upgrade your applications before upgrading to Rancher v2.15. Uninstallation after v2.15 and replacement with an updated version will still be possible.

Major Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where rancher-save-images.sh failed to pull OCI-based Helm charts when the local Docker daemon was configured to use the overlay2 storage driver. See #55068.

Known Issues

• A known issue exists with Rancher v2.15 and Kubernetes v1.36 clusters where Rancher Backups is not listed under the Cluster Tools due to a Backups chart issue. See #1055.

Rancher App (Global UI)

Features and Enhancements

• The Rancher Dashboard replaces the legacy all-in-one Workloads list with a new Workloads Overview UI view to solve major performance and scalability issues when viewing workload resources. See #11513.

Rancher Monitoring Dashboards

[!IMPORTANT] Starting in Rancher v2.15.0, new monitoring installations use the decoupled rancher-monitoring-dashboards chart. Rancher maintains the legacy rancher-monitoring chart to support existing deployments, but it does not receive new updates. Use the rancher-monitoring-dashboards chart for ongoing updates and support.

The rancher-monitoring-dashboards chart provides Grafana dashboards and Rancher UI integration for external Prometheus monitoring stacks, such as kube-prometheus-stack.

• No bundled runtime: Operates without depending on Rancher-shipped kube-prometheus-stack images or components. It operates independently and does not require installing the legacy rancher-monitoring chart. It installs a dashboard-only version of rancher-monitoring.
• Prerequisites: Requires uninstalling the rancher-monitoring chart and using a Prometheus infrastructure. Although several configurations are supported, installing kube-prometheus-stack is the simplest method.

For more detailed information regarding installation and migrations check the Monitoring and Dashboards documentation, and refer to the evolution of SUSE Rancher Observability blog post for further context. See #221 and #265.

Behavior Changes

• The option to disable the feature flag ui-sql-cache / Vai / Server-Side Pagination (SSP) in the Rancher UI has been removed in preparation for Rancher v2.16, where the feature will always be enabled. See #16822.

• Removal: Support for Ember-based UI plugins for cluster and node drivers (deprecated since Rancher v2.11.0) is removed in Rancher v2.15.0. Migrate your plugins to the UI Extensions Framework. For details, see #14005.

Major Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where selecting Enable Dual-Stack with Stack Preference set to IPv6 omitted the required UI warning. Dual-stack clusters require the Stack Preference option to be set to Dual. For details, see #16788.

Authentication

Features and Enhancements

• Azure AD SSO Logout: Rancher now supports Single Logout (SLO) for the Azure AD auth provider. When enabled, logging out of Rancher also terminates the user’s Azure AD session by redirecting to Azure AD’s end-session endpoint. A LogoutEndpoint override field is available for sovereign-cloud deployments (Azure US Government, China). An optional LogoutAllForced flag can prevent users from bypassing SSO logout. See #54566.

• Added the hide-local-auth-provider feature flag (disabled by default) to restrict local authentication usage once an External Authentication Provider (EAP) is active. When enabled, the flag hides the local login interface and removes the ability to create, edit, or delete local users from the UI. Note that password rotation for required administrative local accounts remains allowed to support emergency fallback workflows. See #46078.

Cluster Provisioning

Features and Enhancements

• Rancher v2.15 adds support for Cluster API (CAPI) v1.13.2. See #54304.

• Users with the clusters-create role can now view the CAPIprovider resource. See #55167.

K3s and RKE2 Provisioning

Features and Enhancements

• General Availability: Promoted support for native Cluster API (CAPI) infrastructure providers within Rancher’s V2 provisioning framework (v2prov) from Tech Preview to General Availability (GA). See #53777.

  • If the CAPA infrastructure provider is installed, Rancher will mirror cloud credentials for AWS and create a corresponding AWSClusterStaticIdentity object that targets the fleet-default namespace.

Behavior Changes

• By default, the Standard User and Create Clusters global permissions now allow creating and then updating CAPI infrastructure objects in the fleet-default namespace. Note that manually created infrastructure provider identity objects, such as AWSClusterStaticIdentity or VSphereClusterIdentity, that target the fleet-default namespace can be used through CAPI infrastructure objects such as AWSCluster or VsphereCluster. See #53777.

• When using native CAPI infrastructure providers with v2prov, Rancher will now generate the bootstrap cloud-config in the Jinja format. User-data for regular node drivers with v2prov is unaffected. See #53777.

Known Issues

• A known issue exists related to CAPI infrastructure providers within Rancher’s V2 provisioning framework. Creating or editing v2prov clusters with native infrastructure providers (such as CAPA or CAPV) from the UI can under some failure conditions leave unused, orphaned infrastructure resources (e.g., AWSMachineTemplate or AWSCluster) in the management cluster which need to be cleaned up manually. See #55752.

Continuous Delivery (Fleet)

Behavior Changes

• Deprecation: Fleet will be removing support for GitRepoRestriction in a future release, making the use of the Policy resource for configuring multi-tenant environments the only option. See #55652.

• Deprecation: Fleet support for unauthenticated webhook calls will be removed in a future release, making the setup of a webhook secret the only option. See #55633.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

Features and Enhancements

• Rancher introduces a new inheritedNamespacedRules field for GlobalRoles, allowing administrators to automatically grant users RBAC permissions to specific namespaces across all downstream clusters (for example, shared monitoring or logging namespaces). Rules defined in inheritedNamespacedRules automatically propagate to all downstream clusters managed by Rancher. If the namespace doesn’t exist on a cluster no rules are added. However, if the namespace does not exist but gets created, the controller triggers and creates the rules. Please note that these inherited rules apply exclusively to downstream clusters and do not affect the local management cluster.

  • Configuring inheritedNamespacedRules currently requires editing the GlobalRole YAML directly or via the API, as direct UI inputs for this specific map are not yet available. Example YAML configuration for a GlobalRole with inheritedNamespacedRules:

    apiVersion: management.cattle.io/v3
    kind: GlobalRole
    metadata:
    namespace: default
    name: test-gr-1
    rules:
    - apiGroups:
    - catalog.cattle.io
    resources:
    - apps
    verbs:
    - create
    inheritedNamespacedRules:
    shared-namespace:
        - apiGroups:
        - catalog.cattle.io
        resources:
        - apps
        verbs:
        - edit
    

    See #50663 for more information.

Virtualization Management (Harvester)

Features and Enhancements

• This release adds support for the harvester-baremetal-container-workload feature flag, disabled by default, within Rancher’s Fleet continuous delivery targeting mechanism. When enabled, the UI stops filtering out Harvester clusters, allowing Fleet bundles and applications to target and deploy container workloads directly to them. After enabling the harvester-baremetal-container-workload feature flag, please validate existing Fleet Bundles to ensure they now select, or don’t select, the required clusters. When disabled, the UI maintains the default behavior and excludes Harvester clusters from Fleet targets. See #12518.

Install/Upgrade Notes

If you’re installing Rancher for the first time, your environment must fulfill the installation requirements.

[!IMPORTANT]

• Rancher now requires the cluster it runs on to have the Kubernetes API Aggregation Layer enabled. This is because Rancher extends Kubernetes with additional APIs by registering its own extension API server. Please note that all versions of Kubernetes supported in this Rancher versions K8s distributions (RKE2/K3s) will have the aggregation layer configured and enabled by default.

  • Refer to the Extension API Server documentation and #50400 for more information.

• Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE/RKE1) has reached end of life as of July 31, 2025. Rancher versions 2.12.0 and later no longer support provisioning or managing downstream RKE1 clusters. We recommend replatforming RKE1 clusters to RKE2 to ensure continued support and security updates. Learn more about the transition here.

  • Rancher now has a pre-upgrade validation check for RKE1 resources which fails and lists the RKE1 resources if present. Refer to #50286 for more information.

• It is crucial that you review the available disk space on your nodes and plan accordingly before upgrading to Rancher v2.12.0 and later to avoid potential disk pressure and pod eviction issues.

  • For additional information, refer to the UI Server Side Pagination - Disk Space documentation.

• Rancher now has an enablement option called AUDIT_LOG_ENABLED for API Audit Logs for a Rancher installation.

  • In Rancher versions 2.11.x and earlier, only the AUDIT_LEVEL could be set and the default log level (0) would disable the audit log. In Rancher versions 2.12.x and later, the default log level (0) now only contains the log request and response metadata, and can be set when configuring AUDIT_LOG_ENABLED. If installing or upgrading via Helm you can enable the API Audit Logs and specify the log level by applying the following setting to your Helm command: --set auditLog.enabled=true --set auditLog.level=0. See the Enabling the API Audit Log to Record System Events documentation and #48941.

Changes in Image Artifacts

Image artifact digests are renamed in Rancher v2.12.0, v2.11.4 and v2.10.8. Up until this change, separate image digests files for each operating system and architecture have been maintained for compatibility reasons. With this change, only one file for each operating system is to be provided:

• The rancher-images-digests-linux-amd64.txt and rancher-images-digests-linux-arm64.txt files are to be renamed to rancher-images-digests-linux.txt.

• The rancher-images-digests-windows-ltsc2019.txt and rancher-images-digests-windows-ltsc2022.txt files are to be renamed to rancher-images-digests-windows.txt.

Upgrade Requirements

• Creating backups: Create a backup before you upgrade Rancher. To roll back Rancher after an upgrade, you must first back up and restore Rancher to the previous Rancher version. Because Rancher will be restored to the same state as when the backup was created, any changes post-upgrade will not be included after the restore.

• Helm version requirements:

  • To manage Rancher 2.12.x and later, you must upgrade your Helm client to version 3.18 or newer.

  • This change is required to reflect the addition of Kubernetes 1.33 support with this release.

  • Currently, the official Helm Version Support Policy dictates that only Helm 3.18 supports the proper Kubernetes version range for Rancher 2.12.

• CNI requirements:

  • For Kubernetes v1.19 and later, disable firewalld as it’s incompatible with various CNI plugins. See #28840.

  • When upgrading or installing a Linux distribution that uses nf_tables as the backend packet filter, such as SLES 15, RHEL 8, Ubuntu 20.10, Debian 10, or later, upgrade to RKE v1.19.2 or later to get Flannel v0.13.0. Flannel v0.13.0 supports nf_tables. See Flannel #1317.

• Requirements for air-gapped environments:

  • When using a proxy in front of an air-gapped Rancher instance, you must pass additional parameters to NO_PROXY. See the documentation and issue #2725.

  • When installing Rancher with Docker in an air-gapped environment, you must supply a custom registries.yaml file to the docker run command, as shown in the K3s documentation. If the registry has certificates, then you’ll also need to supply those. See #28969.

Versions

Images

• rancher/rancher:v2.15.0

Tools

• CLI - v2.15.0

Kubernetes Versions for RKE2/K3s

• v1.36.3 (Default)

• v1.35.7

• v1.34.9

Rancher Helm Chart Versions

In Rancher v2.6.0 and later, in the Apps & Marketplace UI, many Rancher Helm charts are named with a major version that starts with 100. This avoids simultaneous upstream changes and Rancher changes from causing conflicting version increments. This also complies with semantic versioning (SemVer), which is a requirement for Helm. You can see the upstream version number of a chart in the build metadata, for example: 100.0.0+up2.1.0. See #32294.

Long-standing Known Issues

Long-standing Known Issues - Cluster Provisioning

• Not all cluster tools can be installed on a hardened cluster.

• Rancher v2.8.1:

  • When you attempt to register a new etcd/controlplane node in a CAPR-managed cluster after a failed etcd snapshot restoration, the node can become stuck in a perpetual paused state, displaying the error message [ERROR] 000 received while downloading Rancher connection information. Sleeping for 5 seconds and trying again. As a workaround, you can unpause the cluster by running kubectl edit clusters.cluster clustername -n fleet-default and set spec.unpaused to false. See #43735.

Long-standing Known Issues - RKE2 Provisioning

• Rancher v2.7.7:

  • Due to the backoff logic in various components, downstream provisioned K3s and RKE2 clusters may take longer to re-achieve Active status after a migration. If you see that a downstream cluster is still updating or in an error state immediately after a migration, please let it attempt to resolve itself. This might take up to an hour to complete. See #34518 and #42834.

• Rancher v2.7.6:

  • Provisioning RKE2/K3s clusters with added (not built-in) custom node drivers causes provisioning to fail. As a workaround, fix the added node drivers after activating. See #37074.

Long-standing Known Issues - K3s Provisioning

• Rancher v2.7.6:

  • Provisioning RKE2/K3s clusters with added (not built-in) custom node drivers causes provisioning to fail. As a workaround, fix the added node drivers after activating. See #37074.

• Rancher v2.7.2:

  • Clusters remain in an Updating state even when they contain nodes in an Error state. See #39164.

Long-standing Known Issues - Rancher App (Global UI)

• Rancher v2.10.0:

  • After deleting a Namespace or Project in the Rancher UI, the Namespace or Project remains visible. As a workaround, refresh the page. See #12220.

• Rancher v2.9.2:

  • Although system mode node pools must have at least one node, the Rancher UI allows a minimum node count of zero. Inputting a zero minimum node count through the UI can cause cluster creation to fail due to an invalid parameter error. To prevent this error from occurring, enter a minimum node count at least equal to the node count. See #11922.

• Rancher v2.7.7:

  • When creating a cluster in the Rancher UI it does not allow the use of an underscore _ in the Cluster Name field. See #9416.

• Rancher v2.6.4:

  • Deployment securityContext section is missing when a new workload is created. This prevents pods from starting when Pod Security Policy Support is enabled. See #4815.

Long-standing Known Issues - EKS

• Rancher v2.7.0:

  • EKS clusters on Kubernetes v1.21 or below on Rancher v2.7 cannot be upgraded. See #39392.

Long-standing Known Issues - Authentication

• Rancher v2.9.0:

  • There are some known issues with the OpenID Connect provider support:

    • When the generic OIDC auth provider is enabled, and you attempt to add auth provider users to a cluster or project, users are not populated in the dropdown search bar. This is expected behavior as the OIDC auth provider alone is not searchable. See #46104.

    • When the generic OIDC auth provider is enabled, auth provider users that are added to a cluster/project by their username are not able to access resources upon logging in. A user will only have access to resources upon login if the user is added by their userID. See #46105.

    • When the generic OIDC auth provider is enabled and an auth provider user in a nested group is logged into Rancher, the user will see the following error when they attempt to create a Project: projectroletemplatebindings.management.cattle.io is forbidden: User "u-gcxatwsnku" cannot create resource "projectroletemplatebindings" in API group "management.cattle.io" in the namespace "p-9t5pg". However, the project is still created. See #46106.

Long-standing Known Issues - Rancher Webhook

• Rancher v2.7.2:

  • A webhook is installed in all downstream clusters. There are several issues that users may encounter with this functionality:

    • If you rollback from a version of Rancher v2.7.2 or later, to a Rancher version earlier than v2.7.2, the webhooks will remain in downstream clusters. Since the webhook is designed to be 1:1 compatible with specific versions of Rancher, this can cause unexpected behaviors to occur downstream. The Rancher team has developed a script which should be used after rollback is complete (meaning after a Rancher version earlier than v2.7.2 is running). This removes the webhook from affected downstream clusters. See #40816.

Long-standing Known Issues - Virtualization Management (Harvester)

• Rancher v2.13.1:

  • When upgrading to Rancher v2.13.1 or higher while using Harvester v1.6.1, users may encounter an issue with their Load Balancers in downstream clusters using the Harvester Cloud Provider, and must perform the following workaround to instruct Calico to not use any of the IP/interface managed by kube-vip. See #9767.

• Rancher v2.7.2:

  • If you’re using Rancher v2.7.2 with Harvester v1.1.1 clusters, you won’t be able to select the Harvester cloud provider when deploying or updating guest clusters. The Harvester release notes contain instructions on how to resolve this. See #3750.

Long-standing Known Issues - Backup/Restore

• When migrating to a cluster with the Rancher Backup feature, the server-url cannot be changed to a different location. It must continue to use the same URL.

• Rancher v2.13.0:

  • When performing a rollback from Rancher v2.13.0 to v2.12.3 using the backup and restore operator (BRO), the restore does not complete successfully. See #844. To work around this issue, you must scale down your Rancher deployment and uninstall the Webhook chart before performing the restore. For details, refer to this Knowledge Base article.

• Rancher v2.7.7:

  • Due to the backoff logic in various components, downstream provisioned K3s and RKE2 clusters may take longer to re-achieve Active status after a migration. If you see that a downstream cluster is still updating or in an error state immediately after a migration, please let it attempt to resolve itself. This might take up to an hour to complete. See #34518 and #42834.