I've also been testing out Rancher recently and I got way further in my testing of it than I did in my test deploy of a kubernetes cluster using the install docs from Kubernetes. I got closer with kubespray, but had to put it down to work on some other things before I got anything useful set up. I hope to be getting back to my Rancher test this week.

I spent a lot of time setting up a private docker registry, before I realized that I probably could have used one from AWS.

I ran into an issue with using custom registries that really stuck me for a day or two, I put details of how to fix it here: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/13676