You can add static IP addresses, membership criteria, or both in Antrea groups, and then use these groups as the source or destination of the Distributed Firewall policies that you want to apply to one or multiple Antrea container clusters.

Prerequisites

At least one Antrea container cluster is registered to NSX.

Procedure

  1. From your browser, log in to an NSX Manager at https://nsx-manager-ip-address.
  2. Navigate to Inventory > Groups.
    Note: NSX Manager UI fetches the information about registered Antrea container clusters when you start the NSX Manager application in the browser. If the application UI is already open, it does not fetch the Antrea container cluster registration information automatically. This behavior is expected and per the current UI design. If you have registered the first Antrea container cluster after the NSX Manager application is opened, ensure that you refresh the browser after navigating to the Groups page. A manual refresh ensures that the Antrea group type option is visible in the UI when you reach step 5 of this procedure.

    This manual browser refresh is required only once, and not every time after a new Antrea container cluster is registered to NSX.

  3. Click Add Group.
  4. Enter a name and optionally a description for the group.
  5. Click Set and select Antrea as the group type.
    An Antrea group can include membership criteria, static IP addresses, or both. Depending on your requirements, perform steps 6 or 7 or both.
  6. To add a membership criterion, click Add Criterion.
    1. In the Criterion pane, select the container cluster object on which you want to define the condition.
      The supported container cluster objects are: Namespace, Service, and Pod.
    2. Specify the properties of the condition, such as Name or Tag, Tag operator, Scope operator, as required.
    3. (Optional) To add more than one condition in a membership criterion, click the plus icon in the upper-right corner of the Criterion pane, and define the properties of the condition.
      In a membership criterion, NSX joins all the conditions with the AND operator, by default. OR operator is not supported.
    4. (Optional) To add multiple criteria, click Add Criterion again.
      To join membership criteria, AND and OR operators are available. By default, NSX selects the OR operator to join two criteria. AND operator is supported between two criteria only when:
      • Both criteria use the same container cluster object.
      • Both criteria use a single condition.

      For more information about what is supported and not supported for adding membership criteria, see Antrea Groups.

  7. To add static IP addresses in the group, click IP Addresses, and enter IP values in the text box.
    If you want to import IP values from a TXT or a CSV file, click Actions > Import . The values in the file must be separated with commas. The allowed values are IP addresses, IP ranges, or IP addresses in a CIDR format. You can also do a combination of both actions. That is, enter values in the text box and import values from a file. However, the total number of IP values in the text box must not exceed the maximum limit that is displayed on the IP Addresses tab.
  8. Click Apply, and then click Save.

Results

The Antrea group is saved in NSX and the status changes to Success.

Note:
  • Effective members are computed for Antrea groups only when the Antrea groups are used in Distributed Firewall rules.

    When you add Antrea groups with membership criteria, but do not use these groups in any of the Distributed Firewall rules, the effective members of these Antrea groups are not computed or evaluated in NSX. In other words, the Effective Members page of these Antrea groups is empty.

  • When you add static IP addresses in Antrea groups, effective members are currently not displayed in the UI, regardless of whether the groups are used in Distributed Firewall rules.

Example: Add an Antrea Group Based on Pods

Assume that you want to add an Antrea group that contains all Pods running the Revenue, Sales, and Metrics financial applications across all the Namespaces in the Antrea container cluster.

Consider that the following Tags are attached to Pods in the container cluster.
Tag Scope
RevenueApp Finance
SalesApp Finance
MetricsApp Finance

Create a membership criterion with three conditions based on the Pod object as follows:

Criterion:

Pod Tag Equals RevenueApp Scope Equals Finance

Pod Tag Equals SalesApp Scope Equals Finance

Pod Tag Equals MetricsApp Scope Equals Finance

By default, NSX uses the AND operator after each condition. When this Antrea group is used in a Distributed Firewall rule, the effective Pod members for this group are computed.

After the Distributed Firewall policy is realized, go to the Add Group page. Click View Members for this Antrea group, and verify that the effective Pod members are displayed on the Effective Members page.