Quick Tip - Install Metallb as service load balancer with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE)

There have been a few questions in the community asking about service load balancer options when using Tanzu Community Edition (TCE). Out of the box, TCE does support NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX-ALB), but most folks will probably not have access to NSX-ALB or the resources to set that up. As an alternative, either kube-vip and metallb can be used and they are completely free and easy to setup.

I personally have used metallb before and I definitely recommend it for its ease of use and setup. You can find the instructions below on setting up metallb with TCE along with a sample kubernetes (k8s) application to verify its functionality.

Note: Scott Rosenberg is also doing some interesting stuff with Carvel that would enable easy deployment of kube-vip and metallb in TCE. I am hoping I will get some time to take a look at this setup as I think this would be great user experience for TCE just like you can install other k8s applications.

Step 1 - Install metallb into your TCE Workload Cluster:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.10.3/manifests/namespace.yaml
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/metallb/metallb/v0.10.3/manifests/metallb.yaml

Step 2 - Create the metallb configuration which will define the IP Address range that will be allocated for load balancer requests:

cat > metallb-config.yaml <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  namespace: metallb-system
  name: config
data:
  config: |
    address-pools:
    - name: default
      protocol: layer2
      addresses:
      - 192.168.30.240-192.168.30.241
EOF

Step 3 - Install the metallb ConfigMap:

kubectl apply -n metallb-system -f metallb-config.yaml

Verify that all metallb Pods are running:

kubectl -n metallb-system get pods

Step 4 - Deploy sample k8s application that uses service type load balancer such as the famous Yelb application:

kubectl create ns yelb
kubectl -n yelb apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lamw/yelb/master/deployments/platformdeployment/Kubernetes/yaml/yelb-k8s-loadbalancer.yaml

Verify that all Yelb Pods are running:

kubectl -n yelb get pods

Step 5 - Verify Yelb application has allocated an IP Address out of the metallb address range:

kubectl -n yelb get svc

Step 6 - Open a browser to the IP Address shown from the previous step and if everything was configured successfully, you should see the following: