I last worked with Kubernetes around 2022, mostly on AKS. I'm looking at an on-prem setup and would prefer an open-source option with a GUI and as little command-line work as practical.
Is RKE2 with Rancher a good place to start? The infrastructure may be bare metal or VMware, so I need to consider both.
RKE2 plus Rancher is a reasonable starting point for those requirements. RKE2 runs the cluster, while Rancher provides a management interface. It gives you something concrete to evaluate without committing to a commercial platform first.
I'd still expect to use the command line for troubleshooting. Before settling on it, try a small deployment on whichever infrastructure is most likely and check how you'll handle networking, storage, upgrades and backups.
Take a look at Talos Linux too, especially if declarative infrastructure appeals to you. It can run on VMs or bare metal, though provisioning bare metal is easier to plan when you know what remote management the machines support.
There is a tradeoff for your particular request. Talos is API driven and has no shell on the nodes, so don't assume it will feel like a GUI-first alternative to RKE2 and Rancher. Omni is another product worth investigating alongside it if you want a management interface.
The Kubernetes concepts from AKS still apply. The bigger change is that on-prem you have to decide how things like load balancers, storage classes, ingress and certificates will work instead of relying on cloud services to provide them.
For a refresher, build a small kubeadm or K3s cluster and run through Deployments, Services, Ingress, persistent volume claims and a network policy. Practice checking resource descriptions, events and logs with kubectl. A GUI is handy, but those debugging skills will still be useful when something breaks.
If you want something closer to an upstream Kubernetes setup, compare kubeadm and Kubespray. Kubespray uses an inventory and lets you choose a network plugin, while kubeadm avoids adding that extra layer.
Neither suggestion by itself solves the GUI requirement, though. I'd treat them as options for learning or provisioning the cluster, not direct replacements for the whole RKE2 and Rancher combination.
There are commercial options such as OpenShift and Google's on-prem offerings, but licensing cost makes them less attractive if open source is the priority. OpenShift is also fairly opinionated, so check whether its way of managing the platform fits your team before investing time in it.
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