When installing or upgrading the Istio Helm chart through Apps & Marketplace,

  1. If you are installing the chart, click Customize Helm options before install and click Next.
  2. You will see options for configuring the Istio Helm chart. On the Components tab, check the box next to Enabled CNI.

  3. Add a custom overlay file specifying cniBinDir and cniConfDir. For more information on these options, refer to the Istio documentation. An example is below:

    apiVersion: install.istio.io/v1alpha1
kind: IstioOperator
spec:
  components:
    cni:
      enabled: true
  values:
    cni:
      image: rancher/istio-install-cni:1.7.3
      excludeNamespaces:
        - istio-system
        - kube-system
      logLevel: info
      cniBinDir: /opt/cni/bin
      cniConfDir: /etc/cni/net.d

  4. After installing or upgrading Istio, you’ll notice the cni-node pods in the istio-system namespace in a CrashLoopBackoff error. Manually edit the istio-cni-node daemonset to include the following on the install-cni container:

    securityContext:
    privileged: true

Result: Now you should be able to utilize Istio as desired, including sidecar injection and monitoring via Kiali.