Port is another building block in OpenStack Neutron. You will not find a way to create a Port using the Horizon dashboard. As we saw earlier in the Associating a Network to an instance using Horizon recipe, a Port is created implicitly as a part of the create instance operation from the dashboard. However, using CLI, some advanced networking configuration can be accomplished. This recipe shows you how to create a Port using OpenStack CLI.
You will need the following information to get started:
The login credentials for SSH to a node where the Neutron client packages are installed
A shell RC file that initializes the environment variables for CLI
The next set of steps will show you how to use Neutron CLI to create a Port:
Using the appropriate credentials, SSH into the OpenStack node where the Neutron client software packages are installed.
Source the shell RC file to initialize the environment variables required for the CLI commands as seen in the previous recipe.
The command to create a Port is
neutron port-createand the only mandatory parameter is the Network name. However, it is a good practice to specify a name for the Port:
Note that the Port has been assigned a MAC address as well as an IP address.
You can use the
neutron port-listcommand to view a list of all the Ports in the system:
A Port primarily represents an endpoint in a Network. The most common Ports in an OpenStack environment are the virtual interfaces in a virtual machine.
When the neutron port-create command is executed, OpenStack Neutron allocates a unique MAC address to the Port. The Network name argument effectively helps Neutron in identifying a Subnet and then Neutron assigns an IP address to the Port from the list of available IP addresses in the Subnet.
The post-create request is also the most common trigger to configure the physical and virtual Networks using the appropriate drivers.