It seems there are two different meaning for this term. One is about a sort of usage scenario where the virtual network is *directly *mapped to a physical and instance is *directly *connected to the outside world without floating IP or L3 agent [1]. The word 'provider' in this context could be understood as external *provider *of network service. The other one is about a way to allow administrator to associate virtual networks with its underlying physical networks' name/type/segmentation_id, so that segregating between different types of network traffic can be achieved. This is done by Provider Extension [2]. Do I take it correct? If yes, then I am really confused by the section 5.1 of Quantum Admin Guide [3][4] where the Provider Extension is discussed but somehow the first meaning of Provider Network is referred. For instance, the highlighted words in the quotation below is very confusing. Provider networks allow cloud administrators to create OpenStack Networking > networks that map directly to physical networks in the data center. This > is commonly used to give tenants direct access to a "public" network that > can be used to reach the Internet. It may also be used to integrate with > VLANs in the network that already have a defined meaning (e.g., allow a VM > from the "marketing" department to be placed on the same VLAN as bare-metal > marketing hosts in the same data center). > [1] http://docs.openstack.org/trunk/openstack-network/admin/content/use_cases_single_flat.html [2] http://docs.openstack.org/trunk/openstack-network/admin/content/provider_attributes.html [3] http://docs.openstack.org/trunk/openstack-network/admin/content/provider_networks.html [4] http://docs.openstack.org/trunk/openstack-network/admin/content/provider_terminology.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack/attachments/20130521/b648b66c/attachment.html>