The IPAM tool is the integrated way to manage IP-Adresses for your VMs. You need to set them up in order to create VMs/Containers.

This short guide will explain how to add new IPv4 and IPv6 subnets, what each fill mean and what the settings are for.

Settings 🔗

When you create a new IPAM-Range (Subnet of IP-Adresses) inside the IPAM-Tool, you get the option to set it for either a specific node or the whole cluster. It might be desired to differenciate between the two when you have an explicit routing-setup where not every IP will work on any server in the cluster. Using the “IPAM Priority” will decide wether IP-Adresses for a new server will first be used from node-specific subnets or from the global pool.

The IPAM-Distribution can be set to either “Fill” or “Balance”. On fill, the system will try to use all IPs from a Range first before starting with a new range. Balancing means the exact opposite - the system tries to take an IP from the least-used subnet first, subsequently filling each range in parallel.

Via the “IPAM Deployment” you can decide what kind of network conectivity new servers should get. Either IPv4, IPv6 or both are possible. In their respective configuration, the system will take one IP from each type for the server.

Creating new IPv4 Ranges 🔗

Creating a new IPv4 range is fairly simple. You give it a start address and an end address, the subnet-size you want to assign to the server and the IP-Adress for the Gateway. Here you can also decide what scope the range should have, according to the specification mentioned in the “IPAM Priority” setting. It should be noted here, that the start and end addresses are inclusive and all the IPs inbetween are calculated.

Creating new IPv6 Ranges 🔗

For IPv6 you need a bit more technical background (or just use an online subnet-size calculator). In normal cases, we don’t assign single IP-Addresses to a server but whole subnets so we split our existing subnet in multiple smaller ones.

We have our adress from our provider, let’s say fd38:f092:ce14:c74e::/64, which means we have Network of fd38:f092:ce14:c74e:: and a prefix of /64. Now let’s say we want to provide our system with 256 adresses to use for server. We can use our /64 subnet and split it into 256 /72 subnets, which each will have 72,057,594,037,927,936 adresses, so hopefully enough for any use case. We can use a target size of /72 to tell the system that we want to have 256 adresses. The panel will generate all of the available adresses internally so if you us big subnets be prepared for the system to take a while to load while all the adresses are being calculated.

Managing Adresses 🔗

You can manage single adresses by clicking on the range. Here you can see which server the adress is connected with. You can also optionally set a MAC-Adress, since some providers give you a seperate MAC-Adress per IP which you will need to use to communicate. These so-called virtual MACs will be set on the network adapter on the server during the order process.