An overview of Emulex's neutron VEB plugin

1. Neutron VEB Plugin
Nishant Kumar
Emulex Communications

2. 2 Emulex Confidential - © 2013 Emulex Corporation
What does Emulex do?

3. 3 Emulex Confidential - © 2013 Emulex Corporation
What is Neutron?
It’s the networking component of OpenStack
It enables/configures/manages networking between VMs
Software Defined Networking
Supports a plugin architecture
It was called quantum earlier

4. 4 Emulex Confidential - © 2013 Emulex Corporation
What is Neutron? …
Compute
Storage
Network
Nova
Swift (Objects)
Glance (Images)
Neutron
Cinder (Block)
identity Keystone

5. 5 Emulex Confidential - © 2013 Emulex Corporation
Why was Neutron needed?
Manually managing networking of thousands of VMs is complex
and painful
A good cloud OS must provide Network-AS-A-Service model
Network portability for dynamic environments
Do it the OpenStack way with similar look and feel as other
components:
– Centralized management
– Dashboard GUI

6. 6 Emulex Confidential - © 2013 Emulex Corporation
The BIG Picture
Compute node
• Neutron agent
Compute node
• Neutron agent
Dashboard
• Horizon
Network Node
• Neutron server
Block storage
• Cinder
Controller node
• Keystone
• Glance
Public
networkNetwork
Object storage
• Swift
Emulex
adapter
VM VM VM
VM VM VM
Emulex
adapter
Cloud
Admin
User

7. 7 Emulex Confidential - © 2013 Emulex Corporation
Neutron Architecture
VM
Tenant
Scripts
Dashboard
Nova client
API Clients Neutron Server
Neutron
Plugin
Create-net
.
.
.
Create-port
virtual switch
Neutron API
Create-net
.
.
.
Create-port
API
Extensions DB
Neutron plugin agent
virtual switch
Neutron plugin agent
virtual switch
Neutron plugin agent
VM VM
VM VM VM
VM VM VM

8. 8 Emulex Confidential - © 2013 Emulex Corporation
What is VEB?
Virtual Ethernet Bridge
L2 switching in hardware
Faster switching in hardware
Zero utilization of server CPU and Memory

9. 9 Emulex Confidential - © 2013 Emulex Corporation
Why Neutron VEB plugin?
There are plugins that provide L2 management in software:
– OVSwitch
– Linuxbridge
Emulex’s neutron plugin leverages the VEB technology for faster and more
efficient networking in cloud
L2 switching in software has these drawbacks:
– Extra load on resources – CPU, Memory
– Is Slow (Think about switching for ~100 VMs on one node!)
– Traditional monitoring tools cannot ‘see’ packets
It’s a work-in-progress

10. 10 Emulex Confidential - © 2013 Emulex Corporation
L2 switching: SW versus HW
Image Source: http://windowsitpro.com

11. 11 Emulex Confidential - © 2013 Emulex Corporation
www.emulex.com