<ul>
<li>Rancher uses <a href="https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v1.6/en/environments/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">environments</a> as the most coarse-grained element for configuration. </li>
<li>We typically configure dev and prod <em>environments</em>.</li>
<li>Hosts (physical or virtual) are added to environments.</li>
<li><p>Rancher has <a href="https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v1.6/en/environments/#what-is-an-environment-template" rel="nofollow noreferrer">templates</a> for environments. One of the templates is for creating an environment with Kubernetes orchestration. </p></li>
<li><p>K8S has clusters with nodes. Apparently, when you create a Rancher environment following the K8S template, you establish a K8S cluster.</p></li>
</ul>

<p>Questions I could not answer clearly looking at the documentation:</p>

<ol>
<li><em>Is the Rancher environment and the K8S cluster the same thing?</em> (For an environment that uses K8S.)  Or can an environment contain more than one cluster?</li>
<li><em>Is the Rancher host and the K8S node the same thing?</em> (Again, for an environment that uses K8S.)</li>
</ol>

Paulo Merson
<p>An environment contains a set of machines (hosts/nodes), an orchestration engine (kubernetes being one of the 4 options), and a set of members with different roles defining access to them.  You cannot have more than one kubernetes cluster in one environment.</p>

<p>Yes, the kubernetes term is node.</p>

<p>If you want kubernetes you should really be using Rancher 2.x instead of 1.x.  1.x is in maintenance-only mode and  support will eventually be dropped.  2.x is entirely based around kubernetes and is far better integrated with it.</p>
