OpenStack Summit May 2015 Vancouver

Cloud computing technologies like Neutron have made overlay networking a solution for multi-tenant environments: workloads, themselves virtualized, are interconnected through isolated logical networks that are layered on top of the physical networking. However, in typical data centers, not every machine is virtualized: "bare metal" servers are still common, as they run software that is not easily virtualized, or because of performance concerns.

A solution to this problem is to develop gateway capabilities that allow physical devices to be connected to virtual networks, for instance, gateways that bridge between the virtual overlay networks like VXLAN, and physical networks like VLAN, to make them look like a single L2 broadcast domain. These gateways can be software appliances that run on standard x86 hardware and contain an instance of Open vSwitch, or a class of emerging hardware switches that have the ability to terminate VXLAN tunnels, by leveraging OVSDB hardware VTEP schema.

In this talk, we are going present an API proposal describing how the afore-mentioned use case is being tackled. We will describe the requirements that lead to this API definition and how extensibility has been factored in the design, to allow for change; we will highlight the issues faced in bringing this feature to the OpenStack community and how we addressed cross-project dependencies. Finally, we will show a PoC in action, and glimpse in to the roadmap of this effort.