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Running flannel

Once you have pushed configuration JSON to etcd, you can start flanneld. If you published your config at the default location, you can start flanneld with no arguments.

Flannel will acquire a subnet lease, configure its routes based on other leases in the overlay network and start routing packets.

It will also monitor etcd for new members of the network and adjust the routes accordingly.

After flannel has acquired the subnet and configured backend, it will write out an environment variable file (/run/flannel/subnet.env by default) with subnet address and MTU that it supports.

For more information on checking the IP range for a specific host, see Leases and Reservations.

Multiple networks

Flanneld does not support running multiple networks from a single daemon (it did previously as an experimental feature). However, it does support running multiple daemons on the same host with different configurations. The -subnet-file and -etcd-prefix options should be used to "namespace" the different daemons. For example

flanneld -subnet-file /vxlan.env -etcd-prefix=/vxlan/network

Running manually

  1. Download a flannel binary.
wget https://github.com/flannel-io/flannel/releases/latest/download/flanneld-amd64 && chmod +x flanneld-amd64
  1. Run the binary.
sudo ./flanneld-amd64 # it will hang waiting to talk to etcd
  1. Run etcd. Follow the instructions on the etcd page, or, if you have docker just do
docker run --rm --net=host quay.io/coreos/etcd
  1. Observe that flannel can now talk to etcd, but can't find any config. So write some config. Either get etcdctl from the etcd page, or use docker again.
docker run --rm -e ETCDCTL_API=3 --net=host quay.io/coreos/etcd etcdctl put /coreos.com/network/config '{ "Network": "10.5.0.0/16", "Backend": {"Type": "vxlan"}}'

Now flannel is running, it has created a VXLAN tunnel device on the host and written a subnet config file

cat /run/flannel/subnet.env
FLANNEL_NETWORK=10.5.0.0/16
FLANNEL_SUBNET=10.5.72.1/24
FLANNEL_MTU=1450
FLANNEL_IPMASQ=false

Each time flannel is restarted, it will attempt to access the FLANNEL_SUBNET value written in this subnet config file. This prevents each host from needing to update its network information in case a host is unable to renew its lease before it expires (e.g. a host was restarting during the time flannel would normally renew its lease).

The FLANNEL_SUBNET value is also only used if it is valid for the etcd network config. For instance, a FLANNEL_SUBNET value of 10.5.72.1/24 will not be used if the etcd network value is set to 10.6.0.0/16 since it is not within that network range.

Subnet config value is 10.5.72.1/24

cat /run/flannel/subnet.env
FLANNEL_NETWORK=10.5.0.0/16
FLANNEL_SUBNET=10.5.72.1/24
FLANNEL_MTU=1450
FLANNEL_IPMASQ=false

etcd network value is 10.6.0.0/16. Since 10.5.72.1/24 is outside of this network, a new lease will be allocated.

export ETCDCTL_API=3
etcdctl get /coreos.com/network/config
{ "Network": "10.6.0.0/16", "Backend": {"Type": "vxlan"}}

Interface selection

Flannel uses the interface selected to register itself in the datastore.

The important options are:

  • -iface string: Interface to use (IP or name) for inter-host communication.
  • -public-ip string: IP accessible by other nodes for inter-host communication.

The combination of the defaults, the autodetection and these two flags ultimately result in the following being determined:

  • An interface (used for MTU detection and selecting the VTEP MAC in VXLAN).
  • An IP address for that interface.
  • A public IP that can be used for reaching this node. In host-gw it should match the interface address.

Making changes at runtime

Please be aware of the following flannel runtime limitations.

  • The datastore type cannot be changed.
  • The backend type cannot be changed. (It can be changed if you stop all workloads and restart all flannel daemons.)
  • You can change the subnetlen/subnetmin/subnetmax with a daemon restart. (Subnets can be changed with caution. If pods are already using IP addresses outside the new range they will stop working.)
  • The clusterwide network range cannot be changed (without downtime).

Docker integration

Docker daemon accepts --bip argument to configure the subnet of the docker0 bridge. It also accepts --mtu to set the MTU for docker0 and veth devices that it will be creating.

Because flannel writes out the acquired subnet and MTU values into a file, the script starting Docker can source in the values and pass them to Docker daemon:

source /run/flannel/subnet.env
docker daemon --bip=${FLANNEL_SUBNET} --mtu=${FLANNEL_MTU} &

Systemd users can use EnvironmentFile directive in the .service file to pull in /run/flannel/subnet.env

If you want to leave default docker0 network as it is and instead create a new network that will be using flannel you do so like this:

source /run/flannel/subnet.env
docker network create --attachable=true --subnet=${FLANNEL_SUBNET} -o "com.docker.network.driver.mtu"=${FLANNEL_MTU} flannel

Running on Vagrant

Vagrant has a tendency to give the default interface (one with the default route) a non-unique IP (often 10.0.2.15).

This causes flannel to register multiple nodes with the same IP.

To work around this issue, use --iface option to specify the interface that has a unique IP.

Zero-downtime restarts

When running with a backend other than udp, the kernel is providing the data path with flanneld acting as the control plane.

As such, flanneld can be restarted (even to do an upgrade) without disturbing existing flows.

However in the case of vxlan backend, this needs to be done within a few seconds as ARP entries can start to timeout requiring the flannel daemon to refresh them.

Also, to avoid interruptions during restart, the configuration must not be changed (e.g. VNI, --iface values).