Hi Chen.
 
If neutron-ovs-agent downs, it can't affect VM's network connectivity. VM's connectivity is the data plane meanwhile neutron agents( not just ovs agent ) are the control plane. Control plane and the data plane must be independent.
 
 
Thanks
Zhi Chang
 
----- Original message -----
From: "Chen CH Ji" <jichenjc@cn.ibm.com>
To: openstack-discuss@lists.openstack.org
Cc:
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [neutron] do we need neutron-openvswitch-agent running in order to make VMs spawned with provider network?
Date: Fri, Feb 21, 2020 22:48
 
We are running provider network with VLAN /FLAT, does the neutron-openvswitch-agent is mandatory to be running in order to make the VM deployed able to connect outside? 
 
e.g. I have a VM   instance-00000027, I login the VM and ping out side, in the mean time, use another session to 
systemctl stop  neutron-openvswitch-agent.service then wait for a few minutes, the ping will stop, does this is an expected behavior?
I know nova-compute is not running won't affect VM functionality, but does neutron openvswitch agent is needed or not? Thanks a lot
 
[root@kvm02 ~]# virsh list
 Id   Name                State
-----------------------------------
 4    instance-00000027   running
 
[root@kvm02 ~]# virsh console 4
Connected to domain instance-00000027
Escape character is ^]
[root@dede ~]# ping
[root@dede ~]# ping 172.16.32.1
PING 172.16.32.1 (172.16.32.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 172.16.32.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=19.8 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.32.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.667 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.32.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.774 ms
 
Ji Chen
z Infrastructure as a Service architect
Phone: 10-82451493