One of the most popular networking command in Linux is the ifconfig command. It lets you see (and configure) IP address for network interface. It also shows the MAC address for each interface. The MAC address and the IP address viewing is probably the most common reason for using the ifconfig command. In addition the ifconfig command works with physical network interface (like eth0..) and virtual network interface (like Tap interface etc).
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.
In an earlier blog, I have talked about Linux bridge based virtual networking. Recently as part of a comment on my blog, I learnt how to view and interpret the MAC table of Linux bridge. In this installment of WILT (What I Learnt Today) series, I will share how MAC Table can be used for troubleshooting Linux bridges.
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.
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.