VM

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.

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.

If you were to ask someone “what is the most popular open source hypervisor” chances are that the answer will be KVM. Indeed KVM (or Kernel-based Virtual Machine) has played a key role in the open source Linux based virtualization environment. However is it really a hypervisor? Moreover, can KVM by itself run virtual machines? We will delve more into such questions in this blog. We will also understand the relationship between KVM and QEMU (Quick EMUlator).

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.