NAT network for rancher k8s cluster nodes

SUSE Virtualization
2

For your use case — a bare metal OVH server running Harvester 1.3.2, wanting all VM/cluster nodes to communicate via NAT and reach the internet — here is the recommended approach based on the official Harvester networking documentation:

Understanding Harvester’s network types:

Harvester offers three VM network types:

  1. Management Network — uses Calico/Canal overlay (Kubernetes internal). VMs get an internal cluster IP only, no direct external access. Internet access goes via masquerade NAT through the host.
    1. VLAN Network — bridges VMs directly to the physical network (requires VLAN-capable switch/NIC).
      1. Untagged Network — similar to VLAN but without explicit VLAN ID tagging.
    3. For your OVH bare metal scenario (single public IP, need NAT):
  3. The Management Network with masquerade type is your best option. It works like this:
    • VMs get a private IP on the management overlay network.
      • Traffic is masqueraded (NAT’d) through the Harvester host’s public IP for internet access.
        • VMs on the same cluster can communicate with each other directly.
      • Steps:
        1. When creating VMs, attach them to the Management Network.
          1. Set the network interface type to masquerade (this is the default for management network).
            1. VMs will get a 10.x.x.x IP and internet traffic will be NAT’d through the host.
          3. For Rancher-provisioned downstream cluster nodes:
          4. When using the Harvester Node Driver in Rancher to provision RKE2/K3s clusters, the VMs are automatically placed on the management network with masquerade by default. No additional firewall configuration is needed on OVH — the NAT is handled at the Harvester/KubeVirt level.
        3. Limitation: VMs on the management network are not directly reachable from outside the cluster without additional configuration (e.g., setting up a Kubernetes Service with a VIP using the Harvester Load Balancer addon, or port forwarding).
      • Reference: Official Harvester docs > Networking > VM Network