Metallb Loadbalancer

Aug 13, 2023 · 2 min read · kubernetes load_balancers ·

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MetalLB hooks into your Kubernetes cluster, and provides a network load-balancer implementation. In short, 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 paid products to provide load balancers.

This example has been tested on a Ubuntu 1.27 Cluster running on a VMWare ESX host. The IP range 192.168.0.230->192.168.0.240 is available on the local network for use.

Edit Kube Proxy to allow ARP

1kubectl get configmap kube-proxy -n kube-system -o yaml | \ sed -e "s/strictARP: false/strictARP: true/" | \ kubectl apply -f - -n kube-system

Install Metallb via helm

1helm repo add metallb https://metallb.github.io/metallb
2helm install metallb

This will deploy a contoller and a DaemonSet onto all the workers

1(base) (⎈|kubernetes-admin@kubernetes:default)➜  ~ kubectl get po -n metallb
2NAME                                  READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
3metallb-controller-58c5997556-ldlvj   1/1     Running   0          116m
4metallb-speaker-7xx4p                 4/4     Running   0          116m
5metallb-speaker-g4b8l                 4/4     Running   0          116m
6metallb-speaker-pqpng                 4/4     Running   0          116m
7metallb-speaker-vgmk2                 4/4     Running   0          116m
8(base) (⎈|kubernetes-admin@kubernetes:default)➜  ~

Create a file for the Address pool - changing the address range to match your local setup

1
2apiVersion: metallb.io/v1beta1
3kind: IPAddressPool
4metadata:
5  name: first-pool
6  namespace: metallb
7spec:
8  addresses:
9  - 192.168.0.230-192.168.0.240

Apply it

1kubectl apply -f address.yml

Create a file to advertise the address pool

1apiVersion: metallb.io/v1beta1
2kind: L2Advertisement
3metadata:
4  name: example
5  namespace: metallb

and apply it

1kubectl apply -f advertise.yml

Now it can be tested

This will just create a local nginx pod and create a Loadbalancer

1kubectl create deploy nginx --image nginx:latest
2
3kubectl expose deploy nginx --port 80 --type LoadBalancer

The Load balancer Ip can then be found

1(base) (⎈|kubernetes-admin@kubernetes:default)➜  kubectl get svc
2NAME                                  TYPE           CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP     PORT(S)        AGE
3kubernetes                            ClusterIP      10.96.0.1       <none>          443/TCP        80d
4nginx                                 LoadBalancer   10.107.115.48   192.168.0.230   80:30282/TCP   4s