To use the smartness for HotRod clients it is necessary to use the hotrod-internal endpoint.
The internal endpoint can only be used inside of the project as a Route will have a different IP address and the list of IP addresses from the server are internal ONLY.
So the template should expose this service

The hotrod endpoint and it's service is configured to use the Loadbalancer via exposed Route, this would return only the public router address for each instance