Revision as of 09:08, 20 August 2015

OmniSwitch Plug-in for OpenStack Liberty Installation

The OmniSwitch OpenStack Networking Plug-in (OONP) for OpenStack Liberty offers infrastructure services for OpenStack logical networks by coordinating the orchestration of Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitches as the underlying physical network. When used in conjunction with the OpenVSwitch plug-in, end-to-end multi-tenant network provisioning through OpenStack Networking (Quantum/ Neutron) is achieved.

The plug-in is intended to be installed in existing OpenStack Liberty environments to configure the underly- ing physical network for its cloud networking operations.

• Note. This OONP release for Liberty supports only the base plug-in features such as link aggregation, Virtual Chassis, VPA-based networking, and driver support for Telnet and REST. Advanced features such as UNP, MVRP, SPB, and QoS are not currently supported.

OmniSwitch OpenStack Networking Plug-in Architecture

The OpenStack Networking ML2 plug-in provides an extensible architecture that supports a variety of mechanism drivers for configuring physical networks. The architecture provides an environment where multiple independent drivers can be used to configure different network devices from different vendors. Each driver uses its own internal mechanism to communicate with their respective network elements. From the OpenStack Neutron-server perspective a single interface is provided through which the required networking services are provided to the OpenStack cloud applications. This allows OpenStack Network- ing to configure the physical network as well as the virtual switch instances running on the hypervisors. In addition, the OpenStack Networking L3-agent and DHCP-agent are fully supported.

Release OONP_K_R01_3 of the OONP work with the OVS ML2 driver.

The OmniSwitch ML2 Mechanism Driver supports the following hardware platforms with its respective AOS software releases.

• OS6900 and OS10K with AOS 732-R01 SW release and above

• OS685X and OS9000 with AOS 645-R02 SW release and above

• OS6250 and OS6450 with AOS 664-R01 and above, limited to the features supported on this platform

• OS6860 and OS6860E with AOS 811-R01.

In this deployment scenario, the OmniSwitch ML2 Mechanism Driver uses configuration elements from the OpenVSwitch database to ensure configuration consistency and consistent VLAN ID assignment between it and the OVSNeutronPluginV2 plug-in.

OpenStack Networking API support

OpenStack applications using the northbound Neutron 2.0 APIs can manage logical network resources on the underlying physical network without knowing about the networking devices in the physical network.

The plug-in supports all of the standard Neutron 2.0 APIs (listed below).

VLAN Based Tenant Networks

The plug-in supports the VLAN network type. This means that logical networks (also referred to as “tenant networks”) are realized using VLANs in the OmniSwitch; thus, any operation related to tenant networks performed in OpenStack Networking is translated and configured in the OmniSwitch using VLANs. The VLAN id is obtained from the reserved VLAN range defined in the plug-in configuration file.

VLAN ID assignment is efficiently and intelligently used on switch ports by provisioning and de-provisioning VLANs across switches as virtual machines connected to tenant networks are created and destroyed.

Moreover, connectivity from the compute hosts to the physical network is trunked to allow traffic only from the VLANs configured on the host by the virtual switch.

The compute host VLAN trunk configuration on the OmniSwitch is automated through the use of the Alcatel-Lucent VNP mechanism. VNP classification is performed on the basis of either: the MAC address of the virtual machine; or the VLAN tag. While both methods are supported, only one can be used within an OpenStack installation instance. Network node connectivity (DHCP and L3 services) are automatically managed using VLAN-Port-Assignment.

Additional Supported Features

The following additional features are also supported in this release.

Device specific switch_access_method

The feature allows a different access method to be used per individual device in the topology (TELNET or REST) . If an AOS 6.X device is mistakenly configured to use REST interface, an ALERT message will be logged and TELNET will be used automatically on those devices.

OmniSwitch Plug-in for OpenStack Liberty Installation OmniSwitch OpenStack Networking Plug-in (OONP) Installation Overview

• Note. This parameter is added as an additional entry in the existing device configuration. Please refer to the .ini file for the proper format.

VPA based host classification method

In addition to supporting UNP profiles on the edge switches for the interfaces connected to the Compute nodes, static 802.1q tagged plain Vlan-Port-Association (VPA) method is also supported. This is useful mainly for supporting an OS6450 as an edge switch.

Switch save config interval

The range of time interval to save the switch configuration periodically is defined to be 600 - 1800 seconds. If any value is configured out of this range, an ALERT message is logged and the minimum value (600 seconds) is used automatically.

OmniSwitch OpenStack Networking Plug-in (OONP) Installation Overview

OmniSwitch OpenStack Networking Plug-in (OONP) provides OpenStack Networking (Neutron) with the ability to manage the Layer-2 configuration of OmniSwitch devices. The OONP plug-in supports the following features:

• 802.1q VLAN based tenant networks.

• Multiple physical topologies - ranging from a single switch to multi-switch based core-edge and spine- leaf topologies.
• Edge port (Host VM connections) automatic configuration based on VLAN Port Assignment (VPA). The following product matrix shows which features are supported/used for physical OmniSwitch configuration: