Networking requirements

Due to the use of containers to isolate the OpenStack services, the deployment needs special networking configuration. OSA uses various bridges to provide network connectivity to the LXC containers. The following is a list of bridges created for connectivity of OpenStack nodes:

• br_mgmt provides management access to the containers
• br_storage provides access to the storage services
• br_vxlan provides tunneled networking using vxlan
• br_vlan is used to provide vlan-based tenant networks

The following table summarizes the network connectivity for OpenStack nodes:

The OpenStack nodes are configured with bonded network links to provide redundancy of network connectivity. Each node is installed with four physical NIC cards. The following figure shows the configuration of the bonded interfaces and connectivity using Linux bridges:

We will look at each of the OpenStack services in subsequent chapters, but if you need to immediately install a production-ready OpenStack environment, follow the documentation at https://docs.openstack.org/developer/openstack-ansible/.

In the next section, we will start discussing a test environment that closely resembles the production setup.