Installing OpenStack with limited switch ports
Is there an OpenStack installer that offers the option of using tagged VLANs during the installation? I'm building an OpenStack environment that uses redundant hardware, but I have limited space for switches. The idea that I had was to use tagged VLANs for the external network. But all of the installers that I've seen, they only work if each physical port on the server corresponds to a network. IE, one of my physical ports on my server needs to be connected to a management switch, another port needs to be connected to the switch for the external network, etc. I'd like to reduce the physical footprint of the switches, by using a single switch with tagged VLAN: 1) one VLAN for the management network 2) one tagged VLAN for the external network 3) etc Taken to the extreme, it seems like it might be possible to use as few as one or two physical ports for all of the OpenStack networks. Is this possible, and if so, which OpenStack distribution offers this?
On Tue, Oct 17, 2023, at 10:25 AM, John van Ommen wrote:
Is there an OpenStack installer that offers the option of using tagged VLANs during the installation?
I'm building an OpenStack environment that uses redundant hardware, but I have limited space for switches. The idea that I had was to use tagged VLANs for the external network. But all of the installers that I've seen, they only work if each physical port on the server corresponds to a network. IE, one of my physical ports on my server needs to be connected to a management switch, another port needs to be connected to the switch for the external network, etc.
I'd like to reduce the physical footprint of the switches, by using a single switch with tagged VLAN:
1) one VLAN for the management network
2) one tagged VLAN for the external network
3) etc
Taken to the extreme, it seems like it might be possible to use as few as one or two physical ports for all of the OpenStack networks.
Is this possible, and if so, which OpenStack distribution offers this?
It has been a while since we did it, but once upon a time we were limited to a single switch port per OpenStack node. The way we dealt with that was to pre provision virtual interfaces on the host and then point our installer at the virtual interfaces rather than physical interfaces. It looked something like several tagged vlans on the physical port, then a linux bridge or ovs switch (I don't recall which one but suspect linux bridges), then virtual interfaces for each of the networks hanging off of the virtual bridge/switch. It may not be the most performant setup as I think you'll lose a bunch of offloading functionality, but it did work for us at the time. I would expect it to still work today; you'll just need to sort out the details of building your virtual networks on each host. Clark
Hello John! If I understand you correctly, I have used networking set ups similar to what you have described with Charmed OpenStack and Kolla-Ansible. I know Charmed OpenStack can manage running on a single physical port/interface if you are using MAAS and set up OpenVSwitch bridges attached to the single physical port/interface. That's described in the Charm Guide at https://docs.openstack.org/charm-guide/latest/getting-started/index.html. I'm using this configuration today with some work I'm doing around experimenting with deploying Charmed OpenStack. I previously worked with deployments using Kolla-Ansible on machines with two physical ports on a single NIC in a bonded configuration, and all traffic for OpenStack was routed over tagged VLANs on the bond interface to isolate traffic in a multi-tenant data center environment. Kolla-Ansible has more information about its networking configuration at https://docs.openstack.org/kolla-ansible/latest/reference/networking/neutron.... I think we were able to pass in the names of the VLAN interfaces the same as we would physical network interfaces to Kolla-Ansible's configuration, but I cannot quite remember how the configuration was set up. And this, of course, is my particular experience with what you are describing. These are by no means the only solutions for this, and if I have made an error or omission I welcome someone else to add in more information. Sincerely, Jadon On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 1:29 PM John van Ommen <john.vanommen@gmail.com> wrote:
Is there an OpenStack installer that offers the option of using tagged VLANs during the installation?
I'm building an OpenStack environment that uses redundant hardware, but I have limited space for switches. The idea that I had was to use tagged VLANs for the external network. But all of the installers that I've seen, they only work if each physical port on the server corresponds to a network. IE, one of my physical ports on my server needs to be connected to a management switch, another port needs to be connected to the switch for the external network, etc.
I'd like to reduce the physical footprint of the switches, by using a single switch with tagged VLAN:
1) one VLAN for the management network
2) one tagged VLAN for the external network
3) etc
Taken to the extreme, it seems like it might be possible to use as few as one or two physical ports for all of the OpenStack networks.
Is this possible, and if so, which OpenStack distribution offers this?
participants (3)
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Clark Boylan
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Jadon Naas
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John van Ommen