Getting Started With OpenDaylight and OpenStack

If you’re a fan of networking, you are no doubt very excited by all of the recent excitement in the industry as of late. And there is no larger area of innovation in networking at the moment than Open Source networking. Two of the projects at the forefront of Open Source networking innovation are OpenStack Neutron and OpenDaylight. OpenStack Neutron is driving an API around networking for Infrastructure as a Service Clouds, and has been very successful at driving mindshare in this area.
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Some Thoughts Before the OpenStack Summit in Portland

As we get closer to the OpenStack Summit next week in Portland, I wanted to reflect back on the last 6 months of my community involvement with OpenStack. It was almost 6 months ago when I created the Minnesota OpenStack Meetup in an attempt to drive some discussions, education, collaboration, and community around OpenStack in the Twin Cities. Since that time, the Minnesota OpenStack Meetup group has grown to over 120 members (at 127 at the time of this writing).
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Ryu and OpenStack: Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

Increasingly, I’ve been spending more and more time playing around with and utilizing OpenStack. If you’re looking for a highly configurable and quickly maturing cloud operating system, you can’t go wrong with OpenStack. One of the more interesting parts of OpenStack to a networking guy like me is Quantum. Quantum allows you to create rich topologies of virtual networks, encompassing as much or as little as you want by utilizing different plugins.
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Automate all the things!

(thanks to Hyperbole & A Half & http://memegenerator.net/X-All-The-Things) The image above got me thinking a lot about DevOps and automation. Increasingly, as large scale IaaS clouds are deployed, the first hurdle people hit is around automation. When they arrive at this problem, and my guess it’s pretty early in the cycle, they inevitably turn to an automation tool such as Puppet or Chef. These tools allow for automating pretty much anything you want around deployment, configuration, and management.
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OpenStack and oVirt: Fitting the Pieces Together

Many readers of this blog, as well as my work on the Open@Cisco Blog, will be familiar with both OpenStack and oVirt. I have written many posts on OpenStack and oVirt, but what I want to do with this post is compare the two. Examining where each project has it’s roots, as well as it’s current status and how the two Open Source projects may converge in the future, is a worthy exercise.
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devstack on Fedora

So, it should come as no surprise that I’m a big Fedora user. I’ve been running Fedora since Core 1 came out years ago, and I’ve always been a happy user. As my world has converged around OpenStack recently, the easiest way to work in this environment is by using devstack. For a long while, devstack only workd with Ubuntu. It now supports Fedora, as well as using Qpid instead of the regular RabbitMq.
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CloudStack Goes Apache

The announcement from Citrix that they are migrating CloudStack to the Apache Foundation under the ASL 2.0 license is a move indicative of what it takes to succeed in large scale cloud computing. Cloud computing isn’t like normal off the shelf software. Cloud computing requires building an ecosystem of developers around it. In essence, it requires a community of people deeply committed to the project. If anything, OpenStack has helped to prove this, as it’s one of the fastest growing Open Source projects ever.
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Update on VXLAN in Open vSwitch

So, previously on the other site I blog for, I mentioned VXLAN in OpenStack Quantum. The reasons for this are dictated in that post. While we can start working on the segment ID and multicast address management in Quantum, getting VXLAN support into Open vSwitch can be done in parallel. That process has seen renewed interest recently (see the thread here), and I am happy to report I have setup a git repository with the patches from last fall merged into the latest master branch versions of Open vSwitch.
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