Use a Specific MAC Address for a Pod

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.. _pod_mac_address:

Use a Specific MAC Address for a Pod

Some applications bind software licenses to network interface MAC addresses. Cilium provides the ability to specific MAC addresses for pods at deploy time instead of letting the operating system allocate them.

Configuring the address #######################

Cilium will configure the MAC address for the primary interface inside a Pod if you specify the MAC address in the cni.cilium.io/mac-address annotation before deploying the Pod. This MAC address is isolated to the container so it will not collide with any other MAC addresses assigned to other Pods on the same node. The MAC address must be specified before deploying the Pod.

Annotate the pod with cni.cilium.io/mac-address set to the desired MAC address. For example:

.. code-block:: yaml

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  annotations:
    cni.cilium.io/mac-address: e2:9c:30:38:52:61
  labels:
    app: busybox
  name: busybox
  namespace: default

Deploy the Pod. Cilium will configure the mac address to the first interface in the Pod automatically. Check whether its mac address is the specified mac address.

.. code-block:: shell-session

$ kubectl exec -it busybox -- ip addr
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
7: eth0@if8: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP,M-DOWN> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue qlen 1000
    link/ether e2:9c:30:38:52:61 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 10.244.2.195/32 scope global eth0
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::e46d:f4ff:fe4d:ebca/64 scope link
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever