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 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.