One benefit of installing Longhorn through Rancher catalog is Rancher provides authentication to Longhorn UI.

If there is a new version of Longhorn available, you will see an Upgrade Available sign on the Catalog Apps screen. You can click Upgrade button to upgrade Longhorn manager. See more about upgrade here.

Prerequisites

1. Rancher v2.1+
2. A container runtime compatible with Kubernetes (Docker v1.13+, containerd v1.3.7+, etc.)
3. Kubernetes v1.14+ cluster with 1 or more nodes and Mount Propagation feature enabled. If your Kubernetes cluster was provisioned by Rancher v2.0.7+ or later, MountPropagation feature is enabled by default. Check your Kubernetes environment now. If MountPropagation is disabled, the Base Image feature will be disabled.
4. Make sure curl, findmnt, grep, awk and blkid has been installed in all nodes of the Kubernetes cluster.
5. open-iscsi has been installed on all the nodes of the Kubernetes cluster, and iscsid daemon is running on all the nodes.
   1. For GKE, recommended Ubuntu as guest OS image since it contains open-iscsi already.
   2. For SUSE/openSUSE, use zypper install open-iscsi to install.
   3. For Debian/Ubuntu, use apt-get install open-iscsi to install.
   4. For RHEL/CentOS, use yum install iscsi-initiator-utils to install.
   5. For EKS with EKS Kubernetes Worker AMI with AmazonLinux2 image, use yum install iscsi-initiator-utils to install. You may need to edit cluster security group to allow ssh access.
6. A host filesystem supports file extents feature on the nodes to store the data. Currently we support:
   1. ext4
   2. XFS

Installation

1. Navigate to the Cluster and Project where you will install Longhorn. We recommended to create a new project e.g. Storage for Longhorn.

   

2. Navigate to the Catalog Apps screen.

   

3. Find the Longhorn item in the catalog and click it.

   

4. You can leave the defaults for now.
5. Click Launch. Longhorn will be installed in the longhorn-system namespace.

   

6. Longhorn is now installed.

   

7. Click the index.html link to navigate to the Longhorn dashboard.

   

After Longhorn has been successfully installed, you can access the Longhorn UI by navigating to the Catalog Apps screen.