Book Image

Learning OpenStack Networking - Third Edition

By : James Denton
Book Image

Learning OpenStack Networking - Third Edition

By: James Denton

Overview of this book

OpenStack Networking is a pluggable, scalable, and API-driven system to manage physical and virtual networking resources in an OpenStack-based cloud. Like other core OpenStack components, OpenStack Networking can be used by administrators and users to increase the value and maximize the use of existing datacenter resources. This third edition of Learning OpenStack Networking walks you through the installation of OpenStack and provides you with a foundation that can be used to build a scalable and production-ready OpenStack cloud. In the initial chapters, you will review the physical network requirements and architectures necessary for an OpenStack environment that provide core cloud functionality. Then, you’ll move through the installation of the new release of OpenStack using packages from the Ubuntu repository. An overview of Neutron networking foundational concepts, including networks, subnets, and ports will segue into advanced topics such as security groups, distributed virtual routers, virtual load balancers, and VLAN tagging within instances. By the end of this book, you will have built a network infrastructure for your cloud using OpenStack Neutron.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Using the Linux bridge driver

The Linux bridge Mechanism driver supports a range of traditional and overlay networking technologies, and has support for the following types of drivers:

  • Local
  • Flat
  • VLAN
  • VXLAN

When a host is configured to use the ML2 plugin and the Linux bridge Mechanism driver, the Neutron agent on the host relies on the bridge, 8021q, and vxlan kernel modules to properly connect instances and other network resources to virtual switches. These connections allow instances to communicate with other network resources in and out of the cloud. The Linux bridge Mechanism driver is popular for its dependability and ease of troubleshooting but lacks support for some advanced Neutron features such as distributed virtual routers.

In a Linux bridge-based network implementation, there are five types of interfaces managed by OpenStack Networking:

  • Tap interfaces
  • Physical interfaces...