How to install in kubernetes/Docker?

[t1mt]

I wonder if it is possible to run the vc5 in container? I haven't found any documentation about this. Any documentation/tips would be highly appreciated.

[davidcoles]

Hi Tim. I haven't tried running it in a container recently (although I have thought about it for some testing purposes), but there shouldn't be anything preventing it from running containerised. However, if you are running the backends in containers also then discovering the IP addresses to use in the config file could be an issue. If the backeds are not the same bridge network as the LB then layer 3 balancing via tunneling would need to be used (support has been recently added). The other thing which could be problematic is announcement of VIPs to a router via BGP, as the container would have to advertise the address of the host (unless you were running BIRD or some other routing package on the host and vc5 advertised to that - hmmmm).

If you are running on Kubernetes then you would probably have better luck with a Kubernetes specific LB such as Cilium's own one (https://cilium.io/use-cases/load-balancer/).

If I get a bit of spare time I'll have a look at spinning up a containerised environment to test. If you have more specific description of what you're trying to achieve then I might be able to give suggestions based on that.

I hope that helps!

[t1mt]

I have a k8s + calico ipip cluster, and I'm wondering if it's possible to integrate this project into the K8S cluster to provide an elastic L4LB solution.

[davidcoles]

I spun up a Docker environment and it seems to work with the following Dockerfile, config.yaml and docker command. I added a route to the VIP (192.168.101.1) on the docker host via the LB container (172.17.0.2) which successfully forwards packets to an NGINX container on which I added the VIP to the loopback interface.

Dockerfile.txt

FROM ubuntu:24.04
RUN apt update -y && apt install -y iproute2 ethtool
COPY vc5 /vc5
COPY config.json /config.json

config.yaml

---
vlans:
  1: 172.17.0.0/24

services:

  - name: nginx
    virtual:
      - 192.168.101.1
    servers:
      - 172.17.0.3
    need: 1
    path: /
    policy:
      http:

docker run --privileged --rm -ti vc5:latest ./vc5 172.17.0.2 config.json eth0

[davidcoles]

Can you try the above and see if you are able to reproduce? I just cloned the head of the current main branch and build the vc5 binary from there.

If you want to have an "elastic" solution then that sound like you would be requiring some kind of service discovery system, which is not currently supported. You could of course have a process to generate the config.json file from service discovery and send a reload signal to vc5, but that's a bit of a kludge.

The underlying xvs library, which handles the data-plane, could be controlled by a process which speaks to service discovery (consul/zookeeper/etcd) if a more slick solution is required. vc5 is intended as a replacement for legacy hardware appliances, so a manual "update config file, deploy with Ansible" is sufficient for that purpose.

[t1mt]

Thanks for your reply. I need take some time to digging into the code, and build it as a k8s workload to test it out.