Integration of Tungsten Fabric SDN, OVS, and SR-IOV compute nodes with an ML2 OpenStack mechanism

Cloud

SDN & NFV

Software integration

Business background

Client type

Networking software provider offering solutions including SDN, WAN controllers, SD-WAN/LAN, private cloud and DC provider—with OpenStack playing a key role

Business goal

To expand the Tungsten Fabric (TF, previously OpenContrail) enterprise customer base by enabling current OpenStack users to integrate and later live migrate their OVS- and SR-IOV-based compute nodes to Tungsten Fabric

Our approach

Provide a team of software and network engineers with experience in developing Tungsten Fabric
Prepare a Proof of Concept (PoC), to be presented as a demo at the 2019 Open Infrastructure Summit in Shanghai
Ensure smooth communication between client and team to deliver this R&D project successfully
Deliver CI changes and a complete set of automated tests
Support the client with a live PoC demo at the Open Infrastructure Summit
Open-source the solution

Business benefits

New business opportunities: opened up thanks to the live PoC presentation during the conference.
Fast time-to-market: CodiLime quickly formed an efficient and experienced team to start the project immediately and deliver the PoC on time.
Optimized cost: each team member had a wide range of skills (hardware, networking, software and DevOps) so fewer people were engaged and costs were optimized.
Ensured quality: the solution was released to the open-source community for scrutiny.
Reduced risks: engineers experienced in TF were able to deliver the PoC in short iterations, with the client then able to adjust the scope and requirements.

Technical highlights

The solution was based on the ML2 MechanismDriver framework from OpenStack, enabling the use of numerous ML2-based SDN drivers simultaneously.
This made it possible to manage and orchestrate workloads from one central point and reuse security policies.
OVS-, SR-IOV-, and vRouter-based workloads ran simultaneously.
Ran OVS and SR-IOV workloads while Tungsten Fabric was managing the underlying fabric.
Live migration of OVS-based computes to vRouter-based computes was possible.