Cloud Computing

The best way to learn OpenStack is by installing, running and playing with it directly. In this blog, I will share the details of the VirtualBox based multi-node OpenStack installation. I will be focusing only on the networking aspects when using VirtualBox. I will also share some tips that are important in this deployment. This blog will not cover the steps to install and create a virtual machine using VirtualBox.

I briefly talked about OpenStack Neutron plugins and agents in my blog about OpenStack Neutron components. In this blog, let us go a step further and understand the roles of plugins and the agents.

This is a guest post by Suryanarayana M N V. Having led teams working on Networking protocols, Surya has in-depth knowledge of networking. He has keen interest in the areas of Network Virtualization and NFV. A hyper-scale data center has tens of thousands of servers. How would the network be in such data centers? It need to be simple, scalable and fully automated. In this blog, I will share some insights into the network for Altoona DC of Facebook.

Neutron is the networking project within the OpenStack cloud platform. The purpose of OpenStack Neutron is to provide physical and virtual network resources to the instances (or virtual machines). Before you continue to read this article I would recommend that you read about OpenStack networking concepts. To appreciate the architecture and the functionality of Neutron, it is important to understand the components that are part of Neutron.

In the next installment of “What I learnt today” or WILT, I briefly touch upon Network Namespace. I came across Namespace as part of my ongoing study of OpenStack networking. Namespaces are powerful constructs in Linux that allows you to create a copy of the TCP/IP network stack -all the way from the Ethernet interfaces (L2), routing tables etc.

The goal of this blog is to share some details about how I have setup a cost-effective OpenStack Lab at home. For most enthusiasts, DevStack is the preferred way to experiment with OpenStack. But I wanted something more realistic for my experiments. OpenStack is intended for multi-tenant, distributed and highly scalable cloud. To appreciate its architecture I needed to move beyond DevStack. With a more realistic setup, you can understand how the distributed OpenStack components interact with each other.

I continue the series on virtual networking with an overview of OpenStack networking concepts. OpenStack is an open source project with an aim to create a scalable cloud operating platform. The primary goal of this software platform is to help build public and private clouds. Specifically it allows users to build and operate infrastructure as a service or IaaS clouds.

In the previous post we looked at the fundamental building blocks of physical and virtual networks. Now let us look at two key concepts in physical and virtual networks. They are Ports and VLAN.

In order understand Virtual Networking let us start with the simplest network that many of us operate every day – our home network. The picture below captures what a typical home network looks like. I am sure most of us use wireless rather than wired networks at home but the underlying concepts are very much alike.

Upcoming technologies like OpenFlow and SDN are altering the networking landscape very quickly. The underlying drivers are Cloud Computing and Virtualization. Servers, Storage and Networking make up the trinity for effective Cloud computing strategy. Servers and Storage Virtualization has helped drive the adoption of flexible cloud services already. Now it is time for Network Virtualization.