Hey everyone! I'm in the process of upgrading my Talos cluster from a single control plane node to a trio for high availability and minimal downtime—even though it's just a lab setup. I've set up a virtual IP (VIP) on my eth0 interface as per the official guidelines, but I'm running into some strange behavior. Occasionally, I'm getting warnings in the logs that the etcd service is failing health checks, but then it succeeds in a seemingly random manner. This inconsistency triggers new etcd elections, which results in the VIP shifting nodes and causing delays from 5 to 55 seconds. Here's a sample of the log messages I'm seeing:
```
user: warning: [2025-06-09T21:50:54.711636346Z]: [talos] service[etcd](Running): Health check failed: context deadline exceeded
... (more log messages)
```
This issue occurs about every 10-15 minutes, but if it's more frequent, it can lead to connection errors or instability in my pods, which was not an issue before with just one control plane node. I've already allocated more resources to my environment but haven't seen any improvement. Has anyone else faced similar problems? Are there alternative methods for managing the VIP that might be more reliable? I'm also considering the disk I/O speeds since everything runs on SSDs, but I've tried optimizing those as well. Looking forward to your insights!
4 Answers
Have you thought about ditching the VIP altogether? A lot of folks are recommending switching to KubePrism. It’s designed for managing internal cluster access rather than external, which might suit your use case better.
High disk latency could definitely be a factor here—I had similar issues before. You mentioned you’re running SSDs; have you tried checking the I/O metrics to see if there's something affecting performance? Sometimes using a better storage solution helps.
Sounds like a frustrating issue! You might want to check the etcd logs closely to see what's going on during those health check failures. Usually, you shouldn't have these health check issues popping up regularly. Is this cluster your only environment, or are you running others as well?
Your etcd cluster might not be properly formed. Try using commands like `talosctl etcd status` and `talosctl etcd members` on all control plane nodes. Also, checking those etcd logs could give you more clues. Sometimes, it’s not about the VIP but the cluster setup itself.
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