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Merge "How to support trunk ports with Open vSwitch Agent"

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doc/source/devref/openvswitch_agent.rst
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@ -102,6 +102,204 @@ future to support existing VLAN-tagged traffic (coming from NFV VMs
for instance) and/or to deal with potential QinQ support natively
available in the Open vSwitch.
Tackling the Network Trunking use case
--------------------------------------
Rationale
~~~~~~~~~
At the time the first design for the OVS agent came up, trunking
in OpenStack was merely a pipe dream. Since then, lots has happened
in the OpenStack platform, and many many deployments have gone into
production since early 2012.
In order to address the `vlan-aware-vms <http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/neutron-specs/specs/newton/vlan-aware-vms.html>`_
use case on top of Open vSwitch, the following aspects must be
taken into account:
* Design complexity: starting afresh is always an option, but a
complete rearchitecture is only desirable under some
circumstances. After all, customers want solutions...yesterday.
It is noteworthy that the OVS agent design is already relatively
complex, as it accommodates a number of deployment options,
especially in relation to security rules and/or acceleration.
* Upgrade complexity: being able to retrofit the existing
design means that an existing deployment does not need to go
through a forklift upgrade in order to expose new functionality;
alternatively, the desire of avoiding a migration requires a
more complex solution that is able to support multiple modes of
operations;
* Design reusability: ideally, a proposed design can easily apply
to the various technology backends that the Neutron L2 agent
supports: Open vSwitch and Linux Bridge.
* Performance penalty: no solution is appealing enough if
it is unable to satisfy the stringent requirement of high
packet throughput, at least in the long term.
* Feature compatibility: VLAN `transparency <http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/neutron-specs/specs/kilo/nfv-vlan-trunks.html>`_
is for better or for worse intertwined with vlan awareness.
The former is about making the platform not interfere with the
tag associated to the packets sent by the VM, and let the
underlay figure out where the packet needs to be sent out; the
latter is about making the platform use the vlan tag associated
to packet to determine where the packet needs to go. Ideally,
a design choice to satisfy the awareness use case will not have
a negative impact for solving the transparency use case. Having
said that, the two features are still meant to be mutually
exclusive in their application, and plugging subports into
networks whose vlan-transparency flag is set to True might have
unexpected results. In fact, it would be impossible from the
platform's point of view discerning which tagged packets are meant
to be treated 'transparently' and which ones are meant to be used
for demultiplexing (in order to reach the right destination).
The outcome might only be predicatble if two layers of vlan tags
are stacked up together, making guest support even more crucial
for the combined use case.
It is clear by now that an acceptable solution must be assessed
with these issues in mind. The potential solutions worth enumerating
are:
* VLAN interfaces: in layman's terms, these interfaces allow to
demux the traffic before it hits the integration bridge where
the traffic will get isolated and sent off to the right
destination. This solution is `proven <https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/vlan@tap_experiment>`_
to work for both iptables-based and native ovs security rules
(credit to Rawlin Peters). This solution has the following design
implications:
* Design complexity: this requires relative small changes
to the existing OVS design, and it can work with both
iptables and native ovs security rules.
* Upgrade complexity: in order to employ this solution
no major upgrade is necessary and thus no potential dataplane
disruption is involved.
* Design reusability: VLAN interfaces can easily be employed
for both Open vSwitch and Linux Bridge.
* Performance penalty: using VLAN interfaces means that the
kernel must be involved. For Open vSwitch, being able to use
a fast path like DPDK would be an unresolved issue (`Kernel NIC interfaces <http://dpdk.org/doc/guides/prog_guide/kernel_nic_interface.html>`_
are not on the roadmap for distros and OVS, and most likely
will never be). Even in the absence of an extra bridge, i.e. when
using native ovs firewall, and with the advent of userspace
connection tracking that would allow the `stateful firewall driver <https://bugs.launchpad.net/neutron/+bug/1461000>`_
to work with DPDK, the performance gap between a pure
userspace DPDK capable solution and a kernel based solution
will be substantial, at least under certain traffic conditions.
* Feature compatibility: in order to keep the design simple once
VLAN interfaces are adopted, and yet enable VLAN transparency,
Open vSwitch needs to support QinQ, which is currently lacking
as of 2.5 and with no ongoing plan for integration.
* Going full openflow: in layman's terms, this means programming the
dataplane using OpenFlow in order to provide tenant isolation, and
packet processing. This solution has the following design implications:
* Design complexity: this requires a big rearchitecture of the
current Neutron L2 agent solution.
* Upgrade complexity: existing deployments will be unable to
work correctly unless one of the actions take place: a) the
agent can handle both the 'old' and 'new' way of wiring the
data path; b) a dataplane migration is forced during a release
upgrade and thus it may cause (potentially unrecoverable) dataplane
disruption.
* Design reusability: a solution for Linux Bridge will still
be required to avoid widening the gap between Open vSwitch
(e.g. OVS has DVR but LB does not).
* Performance penalty: using Open Flow will allow to leverage
the user space and fast processing given by DPDK, but at
a considerable engineering cost nonetheless. Security rules
will have to be provided by a `learn based firewall <https://github.com/openstack/networking-ovs-dpdk>`_
to fully exploit the capabilities of DPDK, at least until
`user space <https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/611282/>`_
connection tracking becomes available in OVS.
* Feature compatibility: with the adoption of Open Flow, tenant
isolation will no longer be provided by means of local vlan
provisioning, thus making the requirement of QinQ support
no longer strictly necessary for Open vSwitch.
* Per trunk port OVS bridge: in layman's terms, this is similar to
the first option, in that an extra layer of mux/demux is introduced
between the VM and the integration bridge (br-int) but instead of
using vlan interfaces, a combination of a new per port OVS bridge
and patch ports to wire this new bridge with br-int will be used.
This solution has the following design implications:
* Design complexity: the complexity of this solution can be
considered in between the above mentioned options in that
some work is already available since `Mitaka <https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/neutron-ovs-bridge-name>`_
and the data path wiring logic can be partially reused.
* Upgrade complexity: if two separate code paths are assumed
to be maintained in the OVS agent to handle regular ports
and ports participating a trunk with no ability to convert
from one to the other (and vice versa), no migration is
required. This is done at a cost of some loss of flexibility
and maintainance complexity.
* Design reusability: a solution to support vlan trunking for
the Linux Bridge mech driver will still be required to avoid
widening the gap with Open vSwitch (e.g. OVS has DVR but
LB does not).
* Performance penalty: from a performance standpoint, the adoption
of a trunk bridge relieves the agent from employing kernel
interfaces, thus unlocking the full potential of fast packet
processing. That said, this is only doable in combination with
a native ovs firewall. At the time of writing the only DPDK
enabled firewall driver is the learn based one available in
the `networking-ovs-dpdk repo <https://github.com/openstack/networking-ovs-dpdk>`_;
* Feature compatibility: the existing local provisioning logic
will not be affected by the introduction of a trunk bridge,
therefore use cases where VMs are connected to a vlan transparent
network via a regular port will still require QinQ support
from OVS.
To summarize:
* VLAN interfaces (A) are compelling because will lead to a relatively
contained engineering cost at the expenses of performance. The Open
vSwitch community will need to be involved in order to deliver vlan
transparency. Irrespective of whether this strategy is chosen for
Open vSwitch or not, this is still the only viable approach for Linux
Bridge and thus pursued to address Linux Bridge support for VLAN
trunking. To some extent, this option can also be considered a fallback
strategy for OVS deployments that are unable to adopt DPDK.
* Open Flow (B) is compelling because it will allow Neutron to unlock
the full potential of Open vSwitch, at the expenses of development
and operations effort. The development is confined within the
boundaries of the Neutron community in order to address vlan awareness
and transparency (as two distinct use cases, ie. to be adopted
separately).
Stateful firewall (based on ovs conntrack) limits the adoption for
DPDK at the time of writing, but a learn-based firewall can be a
suitable alternative. Obviously this solution is not compliant with
iptables firewall.
* Trunk Bridges (C) tries to bring the best of option A and B together
as far as OVS development and performance are concerned, but it
comes at the expenses of maintainance complexity and loss of flexibility.
A Linux Bridge solution would still be required and, QinQ support will
still be needed to address vlan transparency.
All things considered, as far as OVS is concerned, option (C) is the most
promising in the medium term. Management of trunks and ports within trunks
will have to be managed differently and, to start with, it is sensible to
restrict the ability to update ports (i.e. convert) once they are bound to
a particular bridge (integration vs trunk). Security rules via iptables
rules is obviously not supported, and never will be.
Option (A) for OVS could be pursued in conjunction with Linux Bridge support,
if the effort is seen particularly low hanging fruit.
However, a working solution based on this option positions the OVS agent as
a sub-optminal platform for performance sensitive applications in comparison
to other accelerated or SDN-controller based solutions. Since further data
plane performance improvement is hindered by the extra use of kernel resources,
this option is not at all appealing in the long term.
Embracing option (B) in the long run may be complicated by the adoption of
option (C). The development and maintainance complexity involved in Option
(C) and (B) respectively poses the existential question as to whether
investing in the agent-based architecture is an effective strategy,
especially if the end result would look a lot like other maturing
alternatives.
Further Reading
---------------