[openstack-dev] [Neutron] Too much "shim rest proxy" mechanism drivers in ML2

henry hly henry4hly at gmail.com
Fri Jun 6 08:17:53 UTC 2014


ML2 mechanism drivers are becoming another kind of "plugins". Although they
can be loaded together, but can not work with each other.

Today, there are more and more drivers, supporting all kinds of networking
hardware and middleware (sdn controller). Unfortunately, they are designed
exclusively as chimney REST proxies.

A very general use case of heterogeneous networking: we have OVS controlled
by ovs agent, and  switchs from different vendor, some of them are
controller by their own driver/agent directly, others are controlled by a
sdn controller middleware. Can we create a vxlan network, across all these
sw/hw switchs?

It's not so easy: neutron ovs use l2 population mech driver, sdn
controllers have their own population way, today most dedicated switch
driver can only support vlan. sdn controller people may say: it's ok, just
put everything under the control of my controller, leaving ml2 plugin as a
shim rest proxy layer. But, shouldn't Openstack Neutron itself be the first
class citizen even if there is not controller involved?

Could we remove all device related adaption(rest/ssh/netconf/of... proxy)
from these mechanism driver to the agent side, leaving only necessary code
in the plugin? Heterogeneous networking may become easier, while ofagent
give a good example, it can co-exist with native neutron OVS agent in vxlan
l2 population. And with the help of coming ML2 agent framework, hardware
device or middleware controller adaption agent could be more simplified.
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