[Openstack] Pondering multi-tenant needs in nova.

Diego Parrilla Santamaría diego.parrilla.santamaria at gmail.com
Thu Feb 3 14:32:51 UTC 2011


Thanks Paul. Your explanation really helps. A vlan is a scarce
resource in cloud infraestructures and most of the people don't know
about it.

I asked about this topic in this thread because I see two different
approaches that colides. And can have a huge impact in the 'account'
entity.

The truth is that most of the datacenter professionals I have talked
about reject the Flat Network model and embrace the VLAN (or more than
one VLAN) per customer model because it is what they know and they
feel 'secured' using them. Openstack let us choose what model to use,
and this great and I think should not change. So, creating an account
entitty directly linked to the network model is dangerous because it
can limit this flexibility.

I know, I have not given any valid answer... but it's something to
consider due to the efforts to support a more complex network
management.

Cheers
Diego

-
Diego Parrilla
nubeblog.com | nubeblog at nubeblog.com | twitter.com/nubeblog
+34 649 94 43 29




2011/2/3 Paul Voccio <paul.voccio at rackspace.com>:
> Diego,
>
> Due to our networking topology, having a vlan per customer isn't really
> feasible. Most switches are limited at 4k or 8k or even 32k. With more
> customers than these switches can reasonably accommodate, having a single
> vlan per customer either limits the portability within a cloud or limits
> the scale at which you can build your cloud. Open vSwitch will alleviate
> some of this pain, but until we get it in XenServer, we're somewhat stuck
> on flat networking.
>
> Paul
>
> On 2/3/11 4:20 AM, "Diego Parrilla Santamaría"
> <diego.parrilla.santamaria at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Hi Monsyne,
>>
>>it's a very interesting topic and I'm curious about the reason why you
>>are using the Flat Networking set up. From the conversations in other
>>threads it seems the Service Providers prefer different networking
>>approaches: VLAN oriented basically.
>>
>>Regards
>>Diego
>>
>>-
>>Diego Parrilla
>>nubeblog.com | nubeblog at nubeblog.com | twitter.com/nubeblog
>>+34 649 94 43 29
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 2:37 AM, Monsyne Dragon <mdragon at rackspace.com>
>>wrote:
>>> I am sorting out some possible implementations for the
>>> multi-tenant-accounting blueprint, and the related system-usage-records
>>>bp,
>>> and I just wanted to run this by anyone interested in such matters.
>>>
>>> Basically, for multitenant purposes we need to introduce the concept of
>>>an
>>> 'account' in nova, representing a customer,  that basically acts as a
>>>label
>>> for a group of resources (instances, etc), and for access control (i.e
>>> customer a cannot mess w/ customer b's stuff)
>>>
>>> There was some confusion on how best to implement this, in relation to
>>> nova's project concept.  Projects are kind of like what we want an
>>>account
>>> to be, but there are some associations (like one project per network)
>>>which
>>> are not valid for our flat networking setup.  I am kind of
>>>straw-polling on
>>> which is better here:
>>>
>>> The options are:
>>> 1) Create a new 'account' concept in nova,  with an account basically
>>>being
>>> a subgroup of a project (providers would use a single, default project,
>>>with
>>> additional projects added if needed for separate brands, or resellers,
>>>etc),
>>> add in access control per account as well as project, and make sure
>>> apis/auth specify account appropriately,  have some way for a default
>>> account to used (per project) so account doesn't get in the way for
>>> non-multitenant users.
>>>
>>> 2) having account == nova's "project", and changing the network
>>> associations, etc so projects can support our model (as well as current
>>> models).  Support for associating accounts (projects) together for
>>> resellers, etc would either be delegated outside of nova or added later
>>> (it's not a current requirement).
>>>
>>> In either case, accounts would be identified by name, which would  be an
>>> opaque string an outside system/person would assign, and could
>>>structure to
>>> their needs (ie. for associating accounts with common prefixes, etc)
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> --
>>>    -Monsyne Dragon
>>>    work:         210-312-4190
>>>    mobile        210-441-0965
>>>    google voice: 210-338-0336
>>>
>>>
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