metallb.md

MetalLB

MetalLB hooks into your Kubernetes cluster, and provides a network load-balancer implementation. It allows you to create Kubernetes services of type "LoadBalancer" in clusters that don't run on a cloud provider, and thus cannot simply hook into 3rd party products to provide load-balancers. The default operationg mode of MetalLB is in "Layer2" but it can also operate in "BGP" mode.

Prerequisites

You have to configure arp_ignore and arp_announce to avoid answering ARP queries from kube-ipvs0 interface for MetalLB to work.

kube_proxy_strict_arp: true

Install

You have to explicitly enable the MetalLB extension and set an IP address range from which to allocate LoadBalancer IPs.

metallb_enabled: true
metallb_speaker_enabled: true
metallb_ip_range:
  - 10.5.0.0/16

By default only the MetalLB BGP speaker is allowed to run on control plane nodes. If you have a single node cluster or a cluster where control plane are also worker nodes you may need to enable tolerations for the MetalLB controller:

metallb_controller_tolerations:
  - key: "node-role.kubernetes.io/master"
    operator: "Equal"
    value: ""
    effect: "NoSchedule"
  - key: "node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane"
    operator: "Equal"
    value: ""
    effect: "NoSchedule"

BGP Mode

When operating in BGP Mode MetalLB needs to have defined upstream peers:

metallb_protocol: bgp
metallb_ip_range:
  - 10.5.0.0/16
metallb_peers:
  - peer_address: 192.0.2.1
    peer_asn: 64512
    my_asn: 4200000000
  - peer_address: 192.0.2.2
    peer_asn: 64513
    my_asn: 4200000000

When using calico >= 3.18 you can replace MetalLB speaker by calico Service LoadBalancer IP advertisement. See calico service IPs advertisement documentation. In this scenarion you should disable the MetalLB speaker and configure the calico_advertise_service_loadbalancer_ips to match your metallb_ip_range

metallb_speaker_enabled: false
metallb_ip_range:
  - 10.5.0.0/16
calico_advertise_service_loadbalancer_ips: "{{ metallb_ip_range }}"

If you have additional loadbalancer IP pool in metallb_additional_address_pools, ensure to add them to the list.

metallb_speaker_enabled: false
metallb_ip_range:
  - 10.5.0.0/16
metallb_additional_address_pools:
  kube_service_pool_1:
    ip_range:
      - 10.6.0.0/16
    protocol: "bgp"
    auto_assign: false
  kube_service_pool_2:
    ip_range:
      - 10.10.0.0/16
    protocol: "bgp"
    auto_assign: false
calico_advertise_service_loadbalancer_ips:
  - 10.5.0.0/16
  - 10.6.0.0/16
  - 10.10.0.0/16