The current design of OVN EgressIP does not honor host-level static routes configured on the primary interface when the RouteViaHost feature is enabled. Instead, OVN EgressIP relies solely on the default route configured in the OVN Gateway Router for making routing decisions.

Several key customers have expressed the need for this capability, as equivalent behavior is already supported in the existing SDN implementation. Due to the absence of this feature in OVN, these customers are unable to migrate their CNI from SDN to OVN. As a result, planned cluster upgrades are currently blocked.

Example Scenario

Consider a cluster where Node A is designated as the egress node:

• The node’s default gateway is 192.168.1.1, attached to br-ex.
• A host-level static route exists for 192.168.2.0/24, configured to use 192.168.1.2 as the next hop.

Although RouteViaHost is enabled, OVN EgressIP continues to route egress traffic via the default gateway (192.168.1.1) instead of honoring the host static route.

When an equivalent static route is manually added to the OVN Gateway Router, egress traffic is routed through the correct gateway. However, this approach is unsupported and not a viable long-term solution.

We request the engineering team to propose and implement a supported and sustainable solution that enables OVN EgressIP to honor host static routes on the primary interface when RouteViaHost is enabled.