Floating IPs

networking-calico includes beta support for floating IPs. Currently this requires running Calico as a Neutron core plugin (i.e. core_plugin = calico) instead of as an ML2 mechanism driver.

Note

We would like it to work as an ML2 mechanism driver too - patches and/or advice welcome!

To set up a floating IP, you need the same pattern of Neutron data model objects as you do for Neutron in general, which means:

• a tenant network, with an instance attached to it, that will be the target of the floating IP
• a Neutron router, with the tenant network connected to it
• a provider network with router:external True that is set as the router’s gateway (e.g. with neutron router-gateway-set), and with a subnet with a CIDR that floating IPs will be allocated from
• a floating IP, allocated from the provider network subnet, that maps onto the instance attached to the tenant network.

Then the Calico agents will arrange that the floating IP is routed to the instance’s compute host, and then DNAT’d to the instance’s fixed IP address.