Customize Floating IP Pools

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This topic describes how to define network profiles for custom floating IP pools.

Custom Floating IP Pool

To deploy Enterprise PKS to vSphere with NSX-T, you must define a Floating IP Pool in NSX Manager. IP addresses from the Floating IP Pool are used for SNAT IP addresses whenever a Namespace is created (NAT mode). In addition, IP addresses from the Floating IP Pool are assigned to load balancers automatically provisioned by NSX-T, including the load balancer fronting the PKS API server and load balancers for pod ingress. For more information, see the Plan Network CIDRs section of Planning, Preparing, and Configuring NSX-T for Enterprise PKS.

You can define a network profile that specifies a custom floating IP pool to use instead of the default pool specified in the Enterprise PKS tile.

To define a custom floating IP pool, follow the steps below:

1. Create a floating IP pool using NSX Manager prior to provisioning a Kubernetes cluster using Enterprise PKS. For more information, see Create IP Pool in the NSX-T documentation.
2. Define a network profile that references the floating IP pool UUID that you defined. The following example defines a custom floating IP pool:

{
    "name": "np-custom-fip",
    "description": "Network Profile for Custom Floating IP Pool",
    "parameters": {
        "fip_pool_ids": [
            "e50e8f6e-1a7a-45dc-ad49-3a607baa7fa0",
            "ebe78a74-a5d5-4dde-ba76-9cf4067eee55"
        ]
    }
}

The example above uses two floating IP pools. With this configuration, if the first pool of IP addresses, e50e8f6e-1a7a-45dc-ad49-3a607baa7fa0, is exhausted, the system will use the IP addresses in the next IP pool that is listed, ebe78a74-a5d5-4dde-ba76-9cf4067eee55.

Note: If you are using multiple Floating IP Pools within the same Tier-0 router, the Floating IP Pools cannot overlap. Overlapping Floating IP Pools are allowed across Tier-0 routers, but not within the same Tier-0 router.