Host network management roadmap inquiry

[Dan Kenigsberg]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 02:44:07PM +0300, Dan Kenigsberg wrote:
> 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,

I have to stand corrected - bridges are on NM agenda, but they are not
yet in. I'm not crazy about its dbus interface but the next statements
still stand:

> 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.