Neutron VXLAN Tenant Networking Support

Problem description

For a customer, we need to provide the best network data plane performance possible. Multiple tunneling protocols exist to enable an L2 over a L3 overlay network: GRE, STT, and VXLAN. Fuel supports GRE tunneling, but the performance of GRE overlay networks has been shown to be deficient. VXLAN tunneling has more promising performance characteristics, with hardware vendors developing chipsets that can provide hardware acceleration for the protocol, and the industry is beginning to settle on the VXLAN protocol as the protocol for SDN solutions. This engineering proposal outlines steps needed to take in Fuel to enable VXLAN tunneling for the tenant data plane.

Proposed change

OpenStack Networking (neutron) already supports VXLAN as one of the tunneling protocols for tenant networks. Most of the work will be focused on enabling support inside Fuel’s components to select this tunnel protocol for configuration and deployment, as well as some UI/UX work to make the option available to the user when configuring networking.

Alternatives

None

Data model impact

Changes to the Nailgun database will be made, to update the supported segmentation types.

REST API impact

None

Upgrade impact

An upgrade script will be written to update the Nailgun database.

Security impact

None

Notifications impact

None

Other end user impact

Performance Impact

This change may have positive performance implications on the tenant networking data plane.

Plugin impact

Due to the structure of the Networking wizard in the Web UI, it is not possible to add VXLAN as a fuel plugin, since Fuel plugins cannot currently modify the Networking wizard, to add new options.

Other deployer impact

Developer impact

None

Infrastructure impact

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

scollins

Work Items

• Fuel-Web UI changes to present VXLAN (or just TUN instead of GRE) as a segmentation type
• Database changes to support VXLAN(TUN) as a segmentation type
• Changes to Nailgun and provisioning layer to deploy and configure Neutron with the appropriate settings to support VXLAN
• Fuel-library changes to add vxlan as supported segmentation type. In neutron_network type (actually only flat, vlan, local, gre and l3_ext are supported)to be able to create a vxlan network
• python-fuelclient changes to add vxlan(tun) as a possible value to –net-segment-type argument

Dependencies

• https://blueprints.launchpad.net/fuel/+spec/combine-tun-and-vlan-cases

Testing

Tests will be created to exercise the UI interactions for the new segmentation option, as well as unit tests for the new configuration deployment.

Documentation Impact

Documentation will be written to document the support for VXLAN in the new release of Fuel.

References

• http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2015-May/065076.html