Host network management roadmap inquiry

[Dan Kenigsberg]

On Sat, Aug 04, 2012 at 08:06:28PM +0300, Livnat Peer wrote:
> 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?

I'm afraid not - netcf-in-NM has been in the planning phase for quite
some time, but NetworkManager still does its own config file parsing.

Now that NM supports bridges, and due to its ubiquitousness on the
desktop, we may want to use it as an API to managing host networking,
instead of asking it "don't touch our config, mister!"
(NM_CONTROLLED=no).

Note that I haven't analysed NM's gaps for our use case, on top of my
issues of trusting a package with an UpperCase name.