You could deploy the vcluster pod without the syncer. That would give you a k3s cluster without a scheduler. You can create deployments, pods, services etc. but

You could deploy the vcluster pod without the syncer. That would give you a k3s cluster without a scheduler. You can create deployments, pods, services etc. but no containers would actually be started. Of course, that means you still need one host cluster though for running the half-baked vclusters on.