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Re: Decoupling of Network and Compute services for the new Network Service design

 

If we can dynamically plug (and presumably unplug) a vNIC into a
vPort, and assign the IP at that time, does that imply that we cannot
use the IP injection into the VM image?  Is it fine to use DHCP or RA
in all cases?


On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 22:29, Ishimoto, Ryu <ryu@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
> I have been following the discussion regarding the new 'pluggable' network
> service design, and wanted to drop in my 2 cents ;-)
> Looking at the current implementation of Nova, there seems to be a very
> strong coupling between compute and network services.  That is, tasks that
> are done by the network service are executed at the time of VM
> instantiation, making the compute code dependent on the network service, and
> vice versa.  This dependency seems undesirable to me as it adds restrictions
> to implementing 'pluggable' network services, which can vary, with many ways
> to implement them.
> Would anyone be opposed to completely separating out the network service
> logic from compute?  I don't think it's too difficult to accomplish this,
> but to do so, it will require that the network service tasks, such as IP
> allocation, be executed by the user prior to instantiating the VM.
> In the new network design(from what I've read up so far), there are concepts
> of vNICs, and vPorts, where vNICs are network interfaces that are associated
> with the VMs, and vPorts are logical ports that vNICs are plugged into for
> network connectivity.  If we are to decouple network and compute services,
> the steps required for FlatManager networking service would look something
> like:
> 1. Create ports for a network.  Each port is associated with an IP address
> in this particular case, since it's an IP-based network.
> 2. Create a vNIC
> 3. Plug a vNIC into an avaiable vPort.  In this case it just means mapping
> this vNIC to an unused IP address.
> 4. Start a VM with this vNIC.  vNIC is already mapped to an IP address, so
> compute does not have to ask the network service to do any IP allocation.
> In this simple example, by removing the request for IP allocation from
> compute, the network service is no longer needed during the VM
> instantiation.  While it may require more steps for the network setup in
> more complex cases, it would still hold true that, once the vNIC and vPort
> are mapped, compute service would not require any network service during the
> VM instantiation.
> IF there is still a need for the compute to access the network service,
> there is another way.  Currently, the setup of the network
> environment(bridge, vlan, etc) is all done by the compute service. With the
> new network model, these tasks should either be separated out into a
> standalone service('network agent') or at least be separated out into
> modules with generic APIs that the network plugin providers can implement.
>  By doing so, and if we can agree on a rule that the compute service must
> always go through the network agent to access the network service, we can
> still achieve the separation of compute from network services.   Network
> agents should have full access to the network service as they are both
> implemented by the same plugin provider.  Compute would not be aware of the
> network agent accessing the network service.
> With this design, the network service is only tied to the network REST API
> and the network agent, both of which are implemented by the plugin
> providers.  This would allow them to implement their network service without
> worrying about the details of the compute service.
> Please let me know if all this made any sense. :-)  Would love to get some
> feedbacks.
> Regards,
> Ryu Ishimoto
>
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