Docker Macvlan network inside container is not reaching to its own host

This is defined behavior for macvlan and is by design. See Docker Macvlan Documentation

  • When using macvlan, you cannot ping or communicate with the default namespace IP address. For example, if you create a container and try to ping the Docker host’s eth0, it will not work. That traffic is explicitly filtered by the kernel modules themselves to offer additional provider isolation and security.

  • A macvlan subinterface can be added to the Docker host, to allow traffic between the Docker host and containers. The IP address needs to be set on this subinterface and removed from the parent address.


The question is "a bit old", however others might find it useful. There is a workaround described in Host access section of USING DOCKER MACVLAN NETWORKS BY LARS KELLOGG-STEDMAN. I can confirm - it's working.

Host access With a container attached to a macvlan network, you will find that while it can contact other systems on your local network without a problem, the container will not be able to connect to your host (and your host will not be able to connect to your container). This is a limitation of macvlan interfaces: without special support from a network switch, your host is unable to send packets to its own macvlan interfaces.

Fortunately, there is a workaround for this problem: you can create another macvlan interface on your host, and use that to communicate with containers on the macvlan network.

First, I’m going to reserve an address from our network range for use by the host interface by using the --aux-address option to docker network create. That makes our final command line look like:

docker network create -d macvlan -o parent=eno1 \
  --subnet 192.168.1.0/24 \
  --gateway 192.168.1.1 \
  --ip-range 192.168.1.192/27 \
  --aux-address 'host=192.168.1.223' \
  mynet

This will prevent Docker from assigning that address to a container.

Next, we create a new macvlan interface on the host. You can call it whatever you want, but I’m calling this one mynet-shim:

ip link add mynet-shim link eno1 type macvlan  mode bridge

Now we need to configure the interface with the address we reserved and bring it up:

ip addr add 192.168.1.223/32 dev mynet-shim
ip link set mynet-shim up

The last thing we need to do is to tell our host to use that interface when communicating with the containers. This is relatively easy because we have restricted our containers to a particular CIDR subset of the local network; we just add a route to that range like this:

ip route add 192.168.1.192/27 dev mynet-shim

With that route in place, your host will automatically use ths mynet-shim interface when communicating with containers on the mynet network.

Note that the interface and routing configuration presented here is not persistent – you will lose if if you were to reboot your host. How to make it persistent is distribution dependent.