This tutorial show you how to enable Azure Arc on your Desktop using Rancher Desktop and the Azure CLI.

Rancher is an open-source desktop application for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Rancher Desktop runs Kubernetes and container management on your desktop. You can choose the version of Kubernetes you want to run. You can build, push, pull, and run container images using either containerd or Moby (dockerd). The container images you build can be run by Kubernetes immediately without the need for a registry.

Get Rancher Desktop from their official website.

With Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes, you can attach and configure Kubernetes clusters running anywhere. You can connect your clusters running on other public cloud providers (GCP, AWS) or clusters running on your on-premise data center (on VMware vSphere, Azure Stack HCI) to Azure Arc. When you connect a Kubernetes cluster to Azure Arc, it will:

• Get an Azure Resource Manager representation with a unique ID.
• Be placed in an Azure subscription and resource group.
• Receive tags just like any other Azure resource.

When installing make sure to select the dockerd (moby) container runtime. You'll also want to make your Rancher installation available to your WSL distros on your Desktop. With the Rancher Desktop App running (I've found that closing the Windows also stops the cluster) we run a few Azure CLI commands to onboard or local cluster to Azure Arc.

We'll be following the official quickstart documentation

Register the Kubernetes Arc provider in your Azure subscription, so with you cli logged into the right subscription:

az provider register --namespace Microsoft.Kubernetes
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.KubernetesConfiguration
az provider register --namespace Microsoft.ExtendedLocation

Show the status of the provider registration like this and wait for it to become ready.

az provider show -n Microsoft.Kubernetes
az provider show -n Microsoft.KubernetesConfiguration
az provider show -n Microsoft.ExtendedLocation

Create resource group for you Arc Enabled Cluster to show up in:

az group create --name AzureArcDesktop --location WestEurope

And then with you local Rancher Desktop cluster in your kubectl context you run the az connectedk8s connect command. You can check the current context using kubectl:

$ kubectl config current-context
rancher-desktop # output of kubectl config

az connectedk8s connect --name AzureArcDesktop1 --resource-group AzureArcDesktop

This command will install the Azure Arc operators on your cluster in the azure-arc namespace. It might take up to 15 minutes for your cluster to become live and visible as connected on the Azure Portal.