title: Consul set up without docker for production use
body: <p>I am doing a POC on Consul for supporting service discovery and multiple microservice versions. Consul clients and server cluster(3 servers) are set up on Linux VMs. I followed the documentation at <a href="https://www.consul.io/intro/index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer" title="consul website">Consul</a> and the set up is successful. </p>
  
  <p>Here is my doubt. My set up is completely on VMs. I've added a service definition using HTTP API. The same service is running on two nodes. 
  The services are correctly registered:</p>
  
  <pre><code>curl http://localhost:8600/v1/catalog/service/my-service
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>gives me the two node details.</p>
  
  <p>When I do a DNS query:</p>
  
  <pre><code>dig @127.0.0.1 -p 8600 my-service.service.consul
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am able to see the expected results with the node which hosts the service. But I cannot ping the service since the service name is not resolved.</p>
  
  <pre><code>ping -c4 my-service or ping -c4 my-service.service.consul
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>ping: unknown host.</p>
  
  <p>If I enter a mapping for <code>my-service</code> in /etc/hosts file, I can ping this, only from the same VM. I won't be able to ping this from another VM on the same LAN or WAN.
  The default port for DNS is 53. Consul DNS interface listens to 8600. I cannot use Docker for DNS forwarding. Is it possible I missed something here? Can consul DNS query work without Docker/dnsmasq or iptables updates?
  To be clear, here is what I would like to have as the end result:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ping my-service
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This needs to ping the nodes I have configured, in a round robin fashion.</p>
  
  <p>Please bear with me if this question is basic, and I've gone through each of the consul related questions in SO.</p>
  
  <p>Also gone through <a href="https://blog.nimbusscale.com/2015/12/28/leveraging-consuls-dns-interface/%20%22%22" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a> and <a href="http://blog.scottlowe.org/2015/02/06/quick-intro-to-consul/%20%22%22" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a> and these too says I need to do extra set up.</p>