LoadBalancer Requirement For None / BareMetal

[timway]

I built a cluster in the OpenShift UI with a single worker node using IPMI (redfish-virtualmedia). It appears to have set the platform type to None. Reading the documentation it indicated I needed a load balancer like MetalLB to get access to services running on the data plane or worker node(s). If I deploy MetalLB I do in fact get access to services. My question is why isn't ingressVips used so this works out of the box?

Prior to deploying MetallLB I see the default ingress controller and I see it configured for a HostNetwork endpoint publishing strategy. If I curl the worker node IP the router is running (only 1 worker node in my case) for a known app like curl --insecure --verbose --header "Host: console-openshift-console.<cluster>.<base>" https://<worker-node-ip> I do in fact get the console back.

A side-effect of this is the OpenShift UI provides a link to OpenShift console that is dead on arrival. An administrator has to deploy and configure MetalLB in the cluster using CLI and then configure the *.apps.<cluster>.<base> wildcard after the fact. Leaving the feature feeling clunky out of the box. I'd have been less confused if the link wasn't shown.