44 Metal LB #

MetalLB is a load-balancer implementation for bare-metal Kubernetes clusters, using standard routing protocols like L2 and BGP as advertisement protocols. It is a network load balancer that can be used to expose services in a Kubernetes cluster to the outside world due to the need to use Kubernetes Services type LoadBalancer with bare-metal.

To enable MetalLB in the RKE2 cluster, the following steps are required:

Install MetalLB using the following command:

$ kubectl apply <<EOF -f
apiVersion: helm.cattle.io/v1
kind: HelmChart
metadata:
  name: metallb
  namespace: kube-system
spec:
  chart: oci://registry.suse.com/edge/charts/metallb
  targetNamespace: metallb-system
  version: 306.0.2+up0.15.3
  createNamespace: true
---
apiVersion: helm.cattle.io/v1
kind: HelmChart
metadata:
  name: endpoint-copier-operator
  namespace: kube-system
spec:
  chart: oci://registry.suse.com/edge/charts/endpoint-copier-operator
  targetNamespace: endpoint-copier-operator
  version: 306.0.1+up0.3.0
  createNamespace: true
EOF

Create the IpAddressPool and the L2advertisement configuration:

apiVersion: metallb.io/v1beta1
kind: IPAddressPool
metadata:
  name: kubernetes-vip-ip-pool
  namespace: metallb-system
spec:
  addresses:
    - 10.168.200.98/32
  serviceAllocation:
    priority: 100
    namespaces:
      - default
---
apiVersion: metallb.io/v1beta1
kind: L2Advertisement
metadata:
  name: ip-pool-l2-adv
  namespace: metallb-system
spec:
  ipAddressPools:
    - kubernetes-vip-ip-pool

Create the endpoint service to expose the VIP:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: kubernetes-vip
  namespace: default
spec:
  internalTrafficPolicy: Cluster
  ipFamilies:
  - IPv4
  ipFamilyPolicy: SingleStack
  ports:
  - name: rke2-api
    port: 9345
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: 9345
  - name: k8s-api
    port: 6443
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: 6443
  sessionAffinity: None
  type: LoadBalancer

Check the VIP is created and the MetalLB pods are running:

$ kubectl get svc -n default
$ kubectl get pods -n default