[Openstack] Use of MAC addresses in Openstack VMs

Vinay Bannai vbannai at gmail.com
Sat Oct 20 18:03:30 UTC 2012


Hi Salvatore,

I agree with your suggestion that if we were all diligent and used locally
administered OUI then it is not an issue.
My concern now is that we are enabling pretty sophisticated tunneling
mechanism in Quantum (as you know being a Quantum key contributor), there
are more ways for the public and private clouds to be connected which leads
to potential MAC conflicts. I am not sure if that is even possible and
maybe my concerns are little too specific, but I figured someone will have
a better insight that I do.

As far your other comment about the service providers, you are right, they
should use their own OUI for deploying VM's and network devices. My
suggestion for the Openstack Foundation is to get an allocation that can be
safely used by the growing community of developers and testers in Openstack
without having to worry about any potential conflicts. This would be owned
by Openstack Foundation and would not be used by Service Providers for
deployment.

Vinay

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 10:19 AM, Salvatore Orlando <sorlando at nicira.com>wrote:

> Hi Vinay,
>
> I understand your concerns about conflicts with already assigned OUIs.
> It is however my opinion that it is not up to the Openstack Foundation,
> but to entities deploying Openstack, to buy MAC OUIs.
> As regards Quantum, we should ensure the default MAC range we use is
> locally assigned; unfortunately I do not know enough about nova-network.
> Also, it is my opinion that a locally-assigned OUI would be sufficient for
> many use cases, without the need for a globally assigned one.
>
> Regards,
> Salvatore
>
> On 20 October 2012 04:05, Vinay Bannai <vbannai at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I was talking to Nachi and Gary during the Quantum design session about
>> the need to have a proper MAC OUI allocation scheme for Openstack
>> development folks. They suggested that I send it out for wider discussion
>> on the mailing list.
>>
>> It turns out that it would be useful for the Openstack foundation to
>> apply for a MAC OUI from IEEE that can be used for development purposes and
>> testing. This way we don't unwittingly use someone else MAC allocation.
>> Here are the details
>>
>> http://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/oui/index.html
>>
>> The cost to get a OUI allocation is around $2000 dollars. Remember if we
>> use random MAC OUI,  the actual owners can assert their legal claim on the
>> MAC address in the event of a conflict now that we have support for more
>> sophisticated tunnels that allow connections from public and private
>> clouds.
>>
>> Comments welcome.
>>
>> Vinay
>>
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>


-- 
Vinay Bannai
Email: vbannai at gmail.com
Google Voice: 415 938 7576
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