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.
In data center and cloud environment, servers used for hosting the virtual machines usually have more than one wired networking interfaces. In fact there are multiple Ethernet interfaces on each server. It is common practice to use one of the interface for ‘managing’ the host itself. This interface is usually accessible from corporate networks and administrators will use this interface for doing SSH into the server. The other interfaces are usually used for virtual machine traffic or storage traffic.
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.
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.
The most common NFV product that I had come across is in security domain viz., firewalls. To get an idea on how good they are, I checked the Juniper, PaloAlto & Fortinet Virtual Firewall products.
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.
One of the buzzwords in the networking industry is NFV. In a series of blogs, I plan to share my understanding of NFV, its benefits, some of the products and its relationship with SDN.
In the previous blog we saw how Linux supports virtual networking using bridges. VMware vSphere is the most popular hypervisor brand in the world and it is natural that it also supports virtual networking. In fact vSphere supports some very advanced networking functions, that are not available in most of the other hypervisors.
Let me introduce the key elements of VMware virtual networking. After reading this blog, I recommend that you read the official guide about virtual networking.
In the previous blog of this series we saw that using Linux bridge we can connect a virtual Ethernet port of a VM to the physical Ethernet port of the hypervisor server. Let us now focus a bit more on these virtual ports to see what happens behind the scenes to make virtual networking actually work.
Software defined networking (SDN) is the current wave sweeping the networking industry. And one of the key enablers of SDN is virtual networking. While SDN and virtual networking are in vogue these days, the support for virtual networking is not a recent development. And Linux bridge has been the pioneer in this regard.
Here is an overview of three basic networking devices - Hub, Bridge and a Switch. This blog and the related YouTube video at the end, will be useful for upcoming topics related to virtual networking such as Linux Bridge and Open vSwitch.
In my first YouTube video, I discuss 3 networking concepts:
- Default Gateway
- DNS Server
- Subnet Mask