Use a local node network in a swarm

Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE) can use your local networking drivers to orchestrate your cluster. You can create a config network, with a driver like MAC VLAN, and you use it like any other named network in MKE. If it’s set up as attachable, you can attach containers.

Warning

Encrypting communication between containers on different nodes works only on overlay networks.

Use MKE to create node-specific networks

Always use MKE to create node-specific networks. You can use the MKE web UI or the CLI (with an admin bundle). If you create the networks without MKE, the networks won’t have the right access labels and won’t be available in MKE.

Create a MAC VLAN network

  1. Log in as an administrator.

  2. Navigate to Networks and click Create Network.

  3. Name the network “macvlan”.

  4. In the Driver dropdown, select Macvlan.

  5. In the Macvlan Configure section, select the configuration option. Create all of the config-only networks before you create the config-from network.

    • Config Only: Prefix the config-only network name with a node hostname prefix, like node1/my-cfg-network, node2/my-cfg-network, etc. This is necessary to ensure that the access labels are applied consistently to all of the back-end config-only networks. MKE routes the config-only network creation to the appropriate node based on the node hostname prefix. All config-only networks with the same name must belong in the same collection, or MKE returns an error. Leaving the access label empty puts the network in the admin’s default collection, which is / in a new MKE installation.

    • Config From: Create the network from a Docker config. Don’t set up an access label for the config-from network. The labels of the network and its collection placement are inherited from the related config-only networks.

  6. Click Create.