The next stable OpenStack release codenamed "Juno" is slated to be released October 16, 2014. From improving live upgrades in Nova to enabling easier migration from Nova Network to Neutron, the OpenStack Juno release will address operational challenges in addition to providing many new features and enhancements across all projects.

As indicated in the latest Stackalytics contributor statistics, Cisco has contributed to seven different OpenStack projects including Neutron, Cinder, Nova, Horizon and Ceilometer as part of the Juno development cycle. This is up from five projects in the Icehouse release. Cisco also ranks first in the number of completed blueprints in Neutron as well.

In this blog post, I'll focus on Neutron contributions, which are the major share of contributions in Juno from Cisco.

Cisco OpenStack team lead Neutron Community Contributions

An important blueprint that Cisco collaborated on and implemented with the community was to develop the Router Advertisement Daemon (radvd) for IPv6. With this support, multiple IPv6 configuration modes including SLAAC and DHCPv6 (both Stateful and Stateless modes) are now possible in Neutron. The implementation provides for running aradvdprocess in the router namespace for handling IPv6 auto address configuration.

To support the distributed routing model introduced by Distributed Virtual Router (DVR), this Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) blueprint implementation handles firewalling North-South traffic with DVR. The fix ensures that firewall rules are installed in the appropriate namespaces across the Network and Compute nodes to support perimeter firewall (North-South). However, firewalling East-West traffic with DVR will be handled in the next development cycle as a Distributed Firewall use case.

Additional capabilities in the ML2 and services framework were contributed for enabling better plugin and vendor driver integration. This included the following blueprint implementations -

• Extensions in Modular Layer 2 (ML2) for extending Neutron core resources using vendor specific extension drivers.
• Vendor validation for service drivers improvements to proactively detect validation failure prior to persistence of service resources and provide a clear indication of failure to the user.
• Idempotent database migration between Neutron deployments enabling upgrades/downgrades incase of different core and service plugins configuration.

Cisco device specific contributions in Neutron

Cisco added Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) ML2 MD and Layer 3 Service Plugin in the Juno development cycle. The ML2 APIC MD translates Neutron API calls into APIC data model specific requests and achieves tenant Layer 2 isolation through End-Point-Groups (EPG).

The APIC MD supports dynamic topology discovery using LLDP, reducing the configuration burden in Neutron for APIC MD and also ensures data is in-sync between Neutron and APIC. Additionally, the Layer 3 APIC service plugin enables configuration of internal and external subnet gateways on routers using Contracts to enable communication between EPGs as well as provide external connectivity. The APIC ML2 MD and Service Plugin have also been made available with OpenStack IceHouse release. Installation and Operation Guide for the driver and plugin is available here.

Enterprise-class virtual networking solution using Cisco Nexus1000v is enabled in OpenStack with its own core plugin. In addition to providing host based overlays using VxLAN (in both unicast and multi-cast mode), it provides Network and Policy Profile extensions for virtual machine policy provisioning.

The Nexus 1000v plugin added support for accepting REST API responses in JSON format from Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM) as well as control for enabling Policy Profile visibility across tenants. More information on features and how it integrates with OpenStack is provided here.

As an alternative to the default Layer 3 service implementations in Neutron, a Cisco router service plugin is now available that delivers Layer 3 services using the Cisco Cloud Services Router(CSR) 1000v.

The Cisco Router Service Plugin introduces a notion of "hosting device" to bind a Neutron router to a device that implements the router configuration. This allows the flexibility to add virtual as well as physical devices seamlessly into the framework for configuring services. Additionally, a Layer 3+ "configuration agent" is available upstream as well that interacts with the service plugin and is responsible for configuring the device for routing and advanced services.  The configuration agent is multi-service capable, supports configuration of hardware or software based L3 service devices via device drivers and also provides device health monitoring statistics.

The VPN as a Service (VPNaaS) driver using the CSR1000v has been available since the Icehouse release, as a proof-of-concept implementation. The Juno release enhances the CSR1000v VPN driver such that it can be used in a more dynamic, semi-automated manner to establish IPSec site-to-site connections, and paves the way for a fully integrated and dynamic implementation with the Layer 3 router plugin planned for the Kilo development cycle.

Summary

The OpenStack team at Cisco has led, implemented and successfully merged upstream numerous blueprints for the Neutron Juno release.  Clearly, some have been critical for the community and others enable customers to better integrate Cisco networking solutions with OpenStack Networking.

Stay tuned for more information on other project contributions in Juno and on Cisco lead sessions at the Kilo Summit in Paris !

You can also download OpenStack Cisco Validated Designs, White papers, and more at www.cisco.com/go/openstack