neutron/doc/source/admin/ovn/router_availability_zones.rst

Router Availability Zones guide for OVN

The purpose of this page is to describe how the router availability zones works with OVN. Prior to reading this document, it is recommended to first read ML2/OVS driver Availability Zones guide<config-az>.

How to configure it

Different from the ML2/OVS driver for Neutron the availability zones for the OVN driver is not configured via a configuration file. Since ML2/OVN does not rely on an external agent such as the L3 agent, certain nodes (e.g gateway/networker node) won't have any Neutron configuration file present. For this reason, OVN uses the local OVSDB for configuring the availability zones that instance of ovn-controller running on that hypervisor belongs to.

The configuration is done via the ovn-cms-options entry in external_ids column of the local Open_vSwitch table:

$ ovs-vsctl set Open_vSwitch . external-ids:ovn-cms-options="enable-chassis-as-gw,availability-zones=az-0:az-1:az-2"

The above command is adding two configurations to the ovn-cms-options option, the enable-chassis-as-gw option which tells the OVN driver that this is a gateway/networker node and the availability-zones option specifying three availability zones: az-0, az-1 and az-2.

Note that, the syntax used to specify the availability zones is the availability-zones word, followed by an equal sign (=) and a colon separated list of the availability zones that this local ovn-controller instance belongs to.

To confirm the specific ovn-controller availability zones, check the Availability Zone column in the output of the command below:

$ openstack network agent list
+--------------------------------------+------------------------------+----------------+-------------------+-------+-------+----------------+
| ID                                   | Agent Type                   | Host           | Availability Zone | Alive | State | Binary         |
+--------------------------------------+------------------------------+----------------+-------------------+-------+-------+----------------+
| 2d1924b2-99a4-4c6c-a4f2-0be64c0cec8c | OVN Controller Gateway agent | gateway-host-0 | az0, az1, az2     | :-)   | UP    | ovn-controller |
+--------------------------------------+------------------------------+----------------+-------------------+-------+-------+----------------+

Note

If you know the UUID of the agent the "openstack network agent show <UUID>" command can also be used.

To confirm the availability zones defined in the system as a whole:

$ openstack availability zone list
+-----------+-------------+
| Zone Name | Zone Status |
+-----------+-------------+
| az0       | available   |
| az1       | available   |
| az2       | available   |
+-----------+-------------+

Using router availability zones

In order to create a router with availability zones the --availability-zone-hint should be passed to the create command, note that this parameter can be specified multiple times in case the router belongs to more than one availability zone. For example:

$ openstack router create --availability-zone-hint az-0 --availability-zone-hint az-1 router-0
+-------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| Field                   | Value                                |
+-------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| admin_state_up          | UP                                   |
| availability_zone_hints | az-0, az-1                           |
| availability_zones      |                                      |
| created_at              | 2020-06-04T08:29:33Z                 |
| description             |                                      |
| external_gateway_info   | null                                 |
| flavor_id               | None                                 |
| id                      | 8fd6d01a-57ad-4e91-a788-ebe48742d000 |
| name                    | router-0                             |
| project_id              | 2a364ced6c084888be0919450629de1c     |
| revision_number         | 1                                    |
| routes                  |                                      |
| status                  | ACTIVE                               |
| tags                    |                                      |
| updated_at              | 2020-06-04T08:29:33Z                 |
+-------------------------+--------------------------------------+

It's also possible to set the default availability zones via the /etc/neutron/neutron.conf configuration file:

[DEFAULT]
default_availability_zones = az-0,az-2
...

When scheduling the gateway ports of a router, the OVN driver will take into consideration the router availability zones and make sure that the ports are scheduled on the nodes belonging to those availability zones.

Note that in the router object we have two attributes related to availability zones: availability_zones and availability_zone_hints:

| availability_zone_hints | az-0, az-1                           |
| availability_zones      |                                      |

This distinction makes more sense in the ML2/OVS driver which relies on the L3 agent for its router placement (see the ML2/OVS driver Availability Zones guide<config-az> for more information). In ML2/OVN the ovn-controller service will be running on all nodes of the cluster so the availability_zone_hints will always match the availability_zones attribute.

OVN Database information

In order to check the availability zones of a router via the OVN Northbound database, one can look for the neutron:availability_zone_hints key in the external_ids column for its entry in the Logical_Router table:

$ ovn-nbctl list Logical_Router
_uuid               : 4df68f1e-17dd-4b9a-848d-b6152ae19203
external_ids        : {"neutron:availability_zone_hints"="az-0,az-1", "neutron:gw_port_id"="", "neutron:revision_number"="1", "neutron:router_name"=router-0}
name                : neutron-8fd6d01a-57ad-4e91-a788-ebe48742d000
...

To check the availability zones of the Chassis, look at the ovn-cms-options key in the other_config column (or external_ids for an older version of OVN) of the Chassis table in the OVN Southbound database:

$ ovn-sbctl list Chassis
_uuid               : abaa9f07-9988-40c0-bd1a-8d8326af08b0
name                : "2d1924b2-99a4-4c6c-a4f2-0be64c0cec8c"
other_config        : {..., ovn-cms-options="enable-chassis-as-gw,availability-zones=az-0:az-1:az-2"}
...

As mentioned in the Using router availability zones section, the scheduling of the gateway router ports will take into consideration the availability zones that the router belongs to. We can confirm this behavior by looking in the Gateway_Chassis table from the OVN Southbound database:

$ ovn-sbctl list Gateway_Chassis
_uuid               : ac61b70f-ff51-43d9-830b-f9bc6d74090a
chassis_name        : "2d1924b2-99a4-4c6c-a4f2-0be64c0cec8c"
external_ids        : {}
name                : lrp-5a40eeca-5233-4029-a470-9018aa8b3de9_2d1924b2-99a4-4c6c-a4f2-0be64c0cec8c
options             : {}
priority            : 2

_uuid               : c1b7763b-1784-4e5a-a948-853662faeddc
chassis_name        : "1cde2542-69f9-4598-b20b-d4f68304deb0"
external_ids        : {}
name                : lrp-5a40eeca-5233-4029-a470-9018aa8b3de9_1cde2542-69f9-4598-b20b-d4f68304deb0
options             : {}
priority            : 1

Each entry on this table represents an instance of the gateway port (L3 HA, for more information see Routing in OVN<ovn_routing>), the chassis_name column indicates which Chassis that port instance is scheduled onto. If we co-relate each entry and their chassis_name we will see that this port has been only scheduled to Chassis matching with the router's availability zones.