Host network management roadmap inquiry

[Livnat Peer]

On 01/08/12 15:59, Mark Wu wrote:
> Sorry for cross-posting!
> 
> I would like to inquiry about the roadmap of host network management in
> oVirt in order to
> make sure the ideas to be worked on are welcomed by community.
> 
> I did some initial investigation on the following topics.  I am not very
> familiar with them, so the information may contain some inaccuracies or
> errors.
> 

Hi Mark,

My name is Livnat Peer, I'm focused on Networking in oVirt.
I am wondering if there is an interest for a monthly meeting on
networking in oVirt. I think we can discuss the current status in
networking features/bugs and the road map for future oVirt versions.

> netcf:
>     
>     It provides cross-platform network configuration library/tool by
> converting the XML definition of an interface into local config file.
> It's already used by libvirt to manage host network interfaces.It
> supports all network entities including bridge, vlan, bond, nic. And it
> also supports configuration rollback.  The benefit for vdsm is making
> host network stack configuration easy to port to other distros.
>     
> Problems found:
>     It doesn't restore interface live state during config transaction
> now. There's a feature request submit for it.
>     There're some advanced settings not supported in netcf, like
> 'NM_CONTROLLED' and some less used bonding options.
> 
>     It doesn't provide python binding officially. But we can use libvirt
> API to integrate it into vdsm. It shouldn't have any impact on engine side.
> 

Making it easy to consume vdsm in other distros has great value for the
ovirt project, I don't see a reason why not to do that.
I think we should start with mapping the gaps of the functionality
currently used by vdsm and see what is missing for us to use netcf.
I think there was a proposal to use Network Manager in Fedora that also
was supposed to work with netcf but I don't have more details on that,

danken  - do you recall something more specific?

BTW - Can you please send the link to the feature request for netcf to
support restore?


> 
> IEEE 802.1Qbg(VEPA)
> 
>      It can offload network switching from server to external physical
> switch. It makes all VMs' traffic visible to physical switch, and
> therefore the existing switch functions (firewall, QoS etc) can be
> applied to VM immediately. The offload also frees up the server resource
> used by switching.
>      Now libvirt supports it by using macvtap as vif and working with
> lldpad, which registers vif's mac/vlan information to the physical
> switch. We can just add a 'virtualport' element to an interface XML
> definition to add a VEPA interface. Probably, to support it in oVirt we
> still need configure lldpad  and query available VSI types for
> virtualport profile.
> 

when discussing the modeling of 802.1Qbg we should also look into
802.1Qbh, the modeling of the two should have a lot in common.

We looked into modeling the above two in the past but did not get a
chance to actually work on it yet.

When adding support for a new technology in ovirt, especially in the
modeling phase I think it is important to understand how ovirt users are
going to use this technology and how the engine and vdsm together are
going to provide a complete solution for our users.


> 
> quantum
> 
>    Both the plugins openvswitch and linuxbridge stores abstract network
> entities (network, port) in database and create bridge/vlan via the tool
> ip/brctl or ovs-vsctl on demand. Only one bridge is created on one
> server and one vlan is created for each virtual network. That means that
> only one nic can be configured for vm network.  It doesn't configure nic
> or bond even if openvswitch also supports bond. Both of traditional
> network stack configuration and quantum will be supported oVirt for
> different purpose, right?
> 

We had some discussions on integration with Quntum which included a few
upstream calls to discuss the gaps we have in order to use quantum in
ovirt. We had Gary that is working on quantum in these sessions and the
link to the summary of our work so far was sent earlier on this thread.



Other than the above I maintain a wiki page with all the gaps we are
aware of for networking in Ovirt -

http://wiki.ovirt.org/wiki/Networking

There you can see that there was a proposal to use Network-Manager in VDSM.

I see that Fabian split the page to features and technologies, thanks
Fabian :)


Livnat



>    Any comments? Thanks!
> 
> 
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