Port Forwarding With Tart

[raghav155]

Hi, I'm trying to create a tart VM (which successfully gets created). I need to connect to a port in this VM from the host machine public IP. But it seems tart itself does not provide that functionality (port forwarding). Is there any work around anyone can suggest ?

[fkorotkov]

Tart itself doesn't have such functionality. You can try to use bridged network so VMs will get unique IPs or create a tunnel on the host with the default NAT network.

Alternatively you can check out Orchard which automates and simplifies management of multiple hosts. Orchard supports port forwarding out of the box.

[HenAmar]

Hey @fkorotkov, Hen from Harness. Are there any plans to support port forwarding capabilities directly, without requiring Orchestrator in the future? This feature is available on other macOS virtualization platforms and seems quite fundamental. While I understand that workarounds are possible, it feels like this is a basic feature that should be handled by the virtualization platform itself, rather than relying on additional components to manage it, especially when multiple VMs are being started and stopped.

[edigaryev]

Hi @HenAmar 👋

Are there any plans to support port forwarding capabilities directly, without requiring Orchestrator in the future?

Have you tried bridged networking in Tart?

You don't need an orchestrator like Orchard to be able to pass --net-bridged to tart run.

[HenAmar]

Hey @edigaryev

I need to communicate with a service running inside a VM from the internet. To achieve this, there are two options:
1. Use bridge networking to assign the VM a dedicated IP.
2. Use port forwarding to route traffic to the VM.

However, since the bare-metal machine is in a farm with no DHCP server, assigning a dedicated IP to the VM via bridge networking isn’t feasible. Port forwarding is the only viable solution in this case.

[fkorotkov]

@HenAmar we'll take a look into this. We'll investigate adding this functionality into Softnet which will allow you to have port forwarding as well as isolation unlike other solutions you mention.