Previously in my Home Lab series, I described how my home lab Kubernetes clusters runs with a DHCP CNI–all pods get an IP address on the same layer 2 network as the rest of my home and an IP from DHCP. This enabled me to run certain software that needed this like Home Assistant which wanted to be able to do mDNS and send broadcast packets to discover device.
However, not all pods actually needed to be on the same layer 2 network and lead to a few situations where I ran out of IP addresses on the DHCP server and couldn’t connect any new devices until reservations expired:
I also had a circular dependency where the main VLAN told clients to use a DNS server that was running in Kubernetes. If I had to reboot the cluster, my Kubernetes cluster could get stuck starting because it tried to query a DNS server that wasn’t started yet (For simplicity, I use DHCP for everything instead of static config).
In this post, I explain how I built a new home lab cluster with K3s and used Multus to run both Calico and my custom Bridge+DHCP CNI so that only pods that need layer 2 access get access.
Continue reading “Kubernetes: A hybrid Calico and Layer 2 Bridge+DHCP network using Multus”