It’s been a few weeks since the Spring 2012 OpenStack Conference took place in San Francisco. The semi-annual event allows developers to get together and plan for the upcoming OpenStack release. It also allows for OpenStack users to show how they deploy the software in production. Given that a year ago was when Quantum, the networking component of OpenStack, was born, I thought it was a good time to reflect back on Cisco’s contribution to the 2012 OpenStack Summit. Cisco was a very active participatant at the event, both in the Design Summit as well as the conference. The OpenStack Foundations 19 members were announced just prior to the event, and Cisco is a Gold level contributor.

In the Design Summit, Cisco OpenStack Engineers made the following contributions:

• Debo Dutta lead sessions on Quantum System Test as well as Scaling OpenStack. The session on scaling was particularly interesting, as it highlighted the gap in understanding what the current scaling limits of OpenStack really are. It also was a forum for some organizations to discuss how far they are scaling OpenStack in production, and for the developers to try and come to an agreement on what scale to shoot for in the Folsom timeframe.
• Edgar Magana Perdomo lead a track on L2 & L3 Network Services Insertion. The key takeaway from this session is that Edgar was not proposing adding new APIs at this point in time, but rather allowing for a CLI to assist with stitching in network services.
• Sumit Naiksatam lead a track on L3 topics. The session was called “IPAM/L3-fwding/NAT/Floating IPs II“, and given the name, was a continuing session on discussing how Quantum can provide L3 services. Getting everyone on the same page was the key for both of these sessions.
• Soren Hansen was responsible for organizing all sessions in the Nova hypervisors track. Soren is a long time OpenStack contributor who recently joined Cisco’s OpenStack team.
• On top of actively leading the above sessions, Cisco’s OpenStack engineering team were active participants in all of the Quantum related sessions, as well as sessions around scaling OpenStack and Horizon integration with Quantum.

As OpenStack continues to mature, the interest in Quantum providing the correct network abstractions is very real. An entire track on day 2 was dedicated to Quantum in fact, and all of the sessions had a large number of attendees. The goal for Quantum in the Folsom timeframe is to hit parity with the existing nova-networking, such that Quantum can become the standard networking environment when people deploy OpenStack.

During the conference Cisco participated in the following ways:

• Lew Tucker, Cisco’s CTO of Cloud and the face of Cisco’s OpenStack participation, gave a keynote at the conference portion of the event. Lew’s slides are available on slideshare here.
• As a Gold Level sponsor, Cisco had a booth in the main exhibit area not far from the conference entrance. We distributed t-shirts with the “OpenStack@Cisco” logo on them. We were able to engage with fellow OpenStack developers, partners, and customers the entire week.
• Cisco was a sponsor of both the conference and the summit.

The key take away from the event was around the production deployments of OpenStack announced around the conference timeframe. OpenStack continues to have a lot of momentum going forward, and the announcements by places like Rackspace show the technology is already being deployed at scale in production.  Cisco is actively working with the OpenStack community to help shape the development of Quantum, Nova, Horizon, and other parts of OpenStack. If you are interested in joining the OpenStack@Cisco team, the team is hiring. Please contact Murali Raju (murraju at cisco dot com) for more information about joining the team!

Tags: OpenStack

We’ve held our annual Cisco Open Source event this week, on May 1st in San Jose. I’m very impressed to see the large turnout and the ultra positive feedback after the keynote and 5 tracks on Linux, SDN, Big Data, Emerging Technologies and Community Development. Wonderful to see Irving Wladawsky-Berger from IBM, Jim Zemlin from the Linux Foundation, Simon Crosby from Bromium and the great discussions that ensued. Next time we’ll have to open this event up to more than just one afternoon, there is just so much open collaboration that is taking place. My thanks to our track leads, Michael Hein who helped me put together the Linux track, Jan Medved and Dave Ward on SDN, Mark Voelker and Ed Warnicke on Big Data, Fabio Maino and Flavio Bonomi on Emerging Technologies, and Peter Saint-Andre for the Community Management and Tools — these guys have already left their mark on timeless and enduring open standards, but it’s amazing to see how good they are in open source!  We’ll have to post the key takeaways in these next blog entries, for now to all those of you who came, contributed and enjoyed this event, we salute you! Open at Cisco is a vibrant and growing community.

Tags: Big Data, Cisco, Linux, open source, SDN

As the oVirt project continues to move forward, a new workshop has been setup in Beijing on March 21st. The workshop page has all the details. If you are in the Asia-Pacific region and are looking to learn more about oVirt, this is a fabulous place to do just that. Interact with developers on the oVirt project, learn about the development process, and get involved. If the oVirt Kickoff Workshop from last fall was any indication, this workshop will be another great event for the oVirt Community. Cisco, as a board member of the oVirt project, is excited to see this community and technology continue to advance forward.

Since the announcement of VXLAN last summer, there has been interest in the Open Source community for an open implementation of this. With the increasing number of  Open Source cloud and virtualization technologies out there, where does VXLAN fit into this picture? I think one logical place for it to exist is inside OpenStack Quantum. As a service providing network connectivity between interface devices, this is a logical place for it to exist, especially as it pertains to disparite plugins.

But before I explain how VXLAN could plug into Quantum, some background may be good. Omar Sultan posted a great 3 part blog series on VXLAN (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). Reading this will give you a good, relevant background on VXLAN.

An Open Source implementation of VXLAN would require 2 pieces: A data path piece, to implement the protocol and framing format. And a control path piece, to handle orchestration of segment IDs and multicast addresses. For the data path piece, patches were posted to the Open vSwitch mailing list in October 2011, but so far have not been merged into either the Open vSwitch project’s git tree, nor the upstream Open vSwitch kernel code in the Linux tree. Once these patches make it into a public git repository, the data path portion of the equation is complete.

But what about the control path piece? One logical landing spot would be in OpenStack Quantum. Looking at version 1.0 of the Quantum API guide, we can begin to see how to add VXLAN support into Quantum. Quantum networks are created agnostic of their underlying segmentation technology. Currently, VLANs are used. Adding in VXLAN support would be as simple as adding in a type to “Create Network” call. Specifying VXLAN would allow Quantum to provision a Segment ID, and allocate a block of multicast addresses to use. Multiple hosts could still be added to multiple networks with a type of VXLAN. Quantum would work great for handling these types of tasks.

The place where this really begins to shine, however, is in the plugin architecture of Quantum. With Quantum handling the tasks of segment ID allocation, the plugins will have to handle the VXLAN protocol implementation for a network with type VXLAN. Vendors can now implement VXLAN in their plugins, and this buys end users the ability to have a heterogenous VXLAN environment out of the box.

I have previously written about oVirt on this blog, but today, the official press release went out. You can read it in full here, but I’d like to quote a bit from the release:

The oVirt project today announced that Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Red Hat and SUSE have joined together to help create a new open source community for the development of open virtualization platforms, including virtual management tools to manage the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. With the oVirt project, the industry gains an open source, openly governed virtualization stack.

The key piece to note above is the community aspect. oVirt as a community will develop and create an ecosystem in which customers, developers, and vendors can all thrive. Since the workshop, the community has been working towards the first release of oVirt for public consumption. Cisco, being on the oVirt board, is proud to be a part of the oVirt community as this community drives towards the initial release of oVirt.

Tags: community, open source, oVirt