Controlplane/Etcd nodes are stuck at provisioning for a new cluster

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Environment

Rancher version >= v2.5.6
An RKE, RKE2 or k3s downstream cluster created in Rancher using either existing nodes, or provisioned using an infrastructure provider
No nodes have been added with the worker role

Situation

When creating a new cluster:

RKE: It will get stuck in "Provisioning" status, while the control plane and etcd nodes will show a "Registering" status.
RKE2/k3s: It will get stuck in "Updating" status, while the control plane and etcd nodes will show a "Waiting for Node Ref" status.
- Provisioning logs will show:
- [INFO ] waiting for at least one control plane, etcd, and worker node to be registered

Resolution

As of Rancher v2.5.6, new RKE, RKE2 or k3s clusters require at least one node with the worker or all roles to begin provisioning. The reason for this is that the downstream cluster requires a worker node to host the Rancher cluster-agent, CoreDNS, metrics-server, and ingress-nginx. Without these workloads, a cluster will not provision correctly.

Disclaimer

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