Voting for the OpenStack Summit is now open! To vote for OpenStack Presentations for the Summit in Hong Kong, use the link provided here. The presentations being voted on now are for the conference portion of the event. There are a lot of great presentations out there. I’d like to highlight the ones I am lucky enough to be a part of here.

• OpenStack Neutron Modular Layer 2 Plugin Deep Dive: This is a presentation myself and Robert Kukura from Red Hat are putting together. The Module Layer 2 (ML2) Neutron plugin is a new plugin for the Havana release. The main feature of this plugin is it’s ability to run multiple MechanismDrivers at the same time. This talk will go into detail on ML2, including deploying it, running Neutron with it, and how it works with multiple network technologies underneath. Bob and I are hoping to do a live demo of a deployment with multiple MechanismDrivers as well!
• OpenDaylight: An Open Source SDN for your OpenStack Cloud: I am very excited about this presentation. OpenDaylight is a brand new Open Source SDN controller. I’m putting this talk together with some great people from the Open Source SDN community: Chris Wright from Red Hat, Anees Shaikh from IBM, and Stephan Baucke from Erricson. We hope to go over some background on OpenDaylight, and then talk about how we see it fitting into OpenStack deployments. This is a session not to miss!
• Agile Network With OpenStack: This is a presentation I’m putting together with Rohit Agarwalla, and it will include information on the existing Cisco Neutron plugin and how it works with Nexus switches, Nexus 1000v, CSR 1000v, Dynamic Fabric Automation, and onePK. Rohit will be giving a demo of how the Cisco plugin can help provide automation and ease deployment of your OpenStack cloud.
• Federating OpenStack User Groups: This is a panel discussion with my good friends and fellow OpenStack User Group founders Mark Voelker, Shannon McFarland, Colin McNamara, and Sean Roberts. This will be a continuation panel discussion from the Portland Summit and will focus on how User Groups can collaborate to extend the reach of OpenStack by sharing content, speakers, and other materials.
• OpenStack Associate Engineer – Basic Install and Operate Workshop: This is a session I am proud to be a part of organized by Colin McNamara. It includes myself, Mark Voelker, Sean Roberts, and Shannon McFarland as well, and will be a two day course that will help to equip trainers with the skills necessary to install, deploy, and manage a three node OpenStack installation. This is an exciting offering and we hope it opens the doors for people new to OpenStack!

So please go ahead and vote for sessions for the upcoming Summit. There are a lot of great presentations out there, and I hope you find the ones I’m a part of to vote for them in addition to many others!

So, it’s now official: I am a member of the OpenStack Neutron core team. I was voted onto the team last week and made official at the weekly Neutron meeting this past Monday. I will initially focus on the Open Source plugins (Open vSwitch, LinuxBridge) and the Modular Layer 2 (ML2) plugin. I wanted to thank Mark McClain for nominating me! The OpenStack Neutron core team is a great group of developers to work with, I’m very excited to continue contributing to OpenStack Neutron going forward!

Last week I attended the OpenStack Summit in Portland. This was my fifth OpenStack Summit, and a lot has changed since I attended my first OpenStack Summit in Santa Clara in 2011. Everything about this spring’s event was bigger: The crowds, the demos, the design summits. It was pretty awesome to see how far OpenStack has come, and even more exciting to see how much is left to be done. So many new ideas around virtual machine scheduling, orchestration, and automation were discussed this week. I thought I’d share some thoughts around the Summit now that things have really sunk in from last week.

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). We have members from all over the United States, as well as the world. I’ve really been happy to see people joining our discussions and participating in sharing their interest and knowledge around OpenStack.

Recently, I had a need to create a multi-node OpenStack Folsom deployment with Quantum. I needed to test out some deployment scenarios for a customer. To make things even more interesting, I wanted to test it out with the recent VXLAN changes in Open vSwitch which went upstream. I thought others may be interested in this as well. I’m planning to document this for Grizzly as well, but the steps should be mostly the same. Also, I’ve opened a blueprint for the Grizzly release to enable the selection of either GRE or VXLAN tunnels when using the Open vSwitch plugin with Quantum.