There has been a flurry of press around Cisco’s release of OpFlex. If you want the nitty gritty details, please read the IETF draft available here. What exactly is OpFlex? The IETF draft sums it up nicely:

The OpFlex architecture provides a distributed control system based on a declarative policy information model. The policies are defined at a logically centralized policy repository (PR) and enforced within a set of distributed policy elements (PE). The PR communicates with the subordinate PEs using the OpFlex Control protocol. This protocol allows for bidirectional communication of policy, events, statistics, and faults.

With the Icehouse release of Neutron impending, we’ve unfortunately uncovered a bug which is affecting ODL integration with Neutron. This bug was introduced by this commit, and the reality is better CI for the ODL plugin would have caught this. I’m going to work to enable this better CI in the near future. The workaround for this is to add the following in your nova.conf:

vif_plugging_<wbr />timeout = 10
vif_plugging_<wbr />is_fatal = False

I’m working on fixing this right now. Implementing the fix above in your nova.conf will get you running again with ODL and OpenStack Neutron. Thanks to Simon Pasquire for finding this bug and noting the workaround as well!

My good friend Dave Meyer just wrote a great blog post at SDN Central available here. A key point which Dave makes is this:

Now, if we step back and ask what is implied by these three observations, you begin to see an important and profound macro trend: Engineering artifacts themselves are no longer the source of sustainable advantage and/or innovation. Rather, sustainable advantage is achieved through engineering systems, organizational culture, and the people and process that comprise the community (and/or organization). Open-source community, code, and associated engineering systems are coming together in a way that is fundamentally transforming the network industry.

As OpenStack marches towards it’s Icehouse release this spring, some work I’ve been doing has finally merged upstream. This week, both the OpenDaylight ML2 MechanismDriver and devstack support for OpenDaylight merged upstream. This was a huge effort which spans the efforts of many people. This was the first step in solidifying the integration of OpenDaylight with OpenStack Neutron, and we have many additional things we can do. To get a first taste of running the two together, please see the video of the OpenDaylight Summit presentation myself, Madhu Venugopal, and Brent Salisbury did in early February.

I am very lucky to be a part of six great presentation submissions for the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Atlanta. The OpenStack Foundation uses voting to help decide which of these talks, panels, and tutorials will be scheduled. I would appreciate your vote for my submissions! I’ll highlight them below.

• Using OpenStack Within An OpenStack Environment: This is a talk which will be similar to the tutorial Madhu, Brent, Ryan and I did at the OpenDaylight Summit, except it will be less tutorial focused and more presentation based. We’ll show you how to use the latest OpenDaylight Hydrogen release with OpenStack Neutron. I’m hoping to add Madhu and Brent to present alongside Dave Meyer and myself.
• OpenStack Integration with OpenDaylight: State of the Union and Future Directions: In this talk, Dave Meyer and I will go over OpenDaylight for people who are new to this Open Source SDN controller. We’ll cover a bit of history and go over what’s supported in the Hydrogen release. And we’ll cover a bit about the future direction. This session will be great for people new to OpenDaylight.
• The Future of OpenStack Networking: This is a panel discussion we put together to discuss future directions of OpenStack Networking. Some great people are proposed on this panel with me: Lew Tucker, who leads Cloud Computing at Cisco and is one of the sharpest minds in the industry; Dan Dumitriu, CEO of Midokura and a trailblazer in the SDN industry; Chris Wright, Technical Director of SDN at Red Hat, and one of the best known names in Open Source networking; and Nils Swart from Plexxi, who is leading their Open Source strategy. A great group of people, this will be a fun panel if it’s accepted.
• Network Policy Abstractions in Neutron: There is work going on in Neutron to add a new Policy API layer here. This will make it easier for application developers and deployers to work with the networking subsystem in OpenStack. This is a talk which will go into details on this. I’m happy to be joined by Mohammad Banikazemi from IBM and Stephen Wong from Midokura. Anyone interested in advanced policy discussions will want to attend this discussion should it be approved.
• An Overview of Open Source Backends for Neutron: This talk will walk people through the options available in the Open Source world for OpenStack Neutron networking. Salvatore Orlando, who is one of the original Neutron core team members, will be my co-presenter, should this talk get approved. This talk would be great for people looking at deployment options which are pure open source.
• Hackathon Syllabus: This is a great talk submitted by Sean Roberts from Yahoo!, and we plan to cover how to hold a Hackathon Style user group meeting. We’ll be joined by Colin McNamara from Nexus IS and Mark Voelker from Cisco. This will be great for people who are looking at forming User Groups focused on hacking!

Please consider any or all of my talks above. I appreciate your votes and look forward to continuing to share my knowledge around Open Source networking!

For the last few months, TimeMachine has been failing for me between my Macs and a QNAP TS-659 NAS I have. The NAS is running firmware 4.0.3, and I would consistently get the error “Cannot connect” when trying to connect. I was able to work around this with the following command run manually:

sudo tmutil setdestination -ap afp://TimeMachine@192.168.64.38/TMBackup

Running that in a terminal window allowed me to then use the GUI to select that disk for backups and things started rolling again. In the above, make sure to replace “192.168.64.38” with your IP or hostname of the QNAP. It will ask you for your password when you run the command. I found all of this on the forum thread here for reference.

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. There are a large number of Plugins and ML2 MechanismDrivers for Neutron in existence already. However, so far, there is no OpenDaylight integration with OpenStack, at least upstream. I am pleased to announce that a team of us are working on making this happen, however. We have a blueprint filed and we are actively working towards the support in OpenDaylight required to support the Neutron APIs. What I’m going to show you in this blog post is how to take what we currently have for a test run and try it out yourself.

Last week I was in New Orleans for LinuxCon. This was my first LinuxCon event, and it was pretty awesome. The event was co-located with a smattering of other Open Technology events as well:

• CloudOpen
• Linux Plumbers Conference
• Xen Project User Summit
• OpenDaylight Mini Summit
• Gluster Workshop 2013
• ENEA North America Hacker Event
• UEFI Plugfest
• Linux Wireless Summit
• Linux Security Summit

As you can see, that’s a lot of events to pack into a single week. I was focused on participating in the LinuxCon keynotes and sessions for the early part of the week. I also worked the OpenDaylight and OpenStack booths for a while on both Monday and Tuesday. It was great to meet so many people and to have amazing conversations around all of the spectacular Open Source technologies I have the pleasure of being involved with. People were very interested in talking about Open Source SDN technologies and how they relate to cloud environments. I had many great discussions around the integration of OpenDaylight with OpenStack Neutron as well.

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!