Currently the PowerVM driver requires a PowerVM specific Neutron agent. This blueprint will add support for additional agent types - specifically the Open vSwitch and Linux Bridge agents provided by Neutron.
PowerVM has support for virtualizing an Ethernet port using the Virtual I/O Server and Shared Ethernet. This is provided using networking-powervm Shared Ethernet Agent. This agent provides key PowerVM use cases such as I/O redundancy.
There are a subset of operators that have asked for VIF support in line with other hypervisors. This would be support for the Neutron Linux Bridge Agent and Open vSwitch agent. While these agents do not provide use cases such as I/O redundancy, they do enable operators to utilize common upstream networking solutions when deploying PowerVM with OpenStack
An operator should be able to deploy an environment using Linux Bridge or Open vSwitch Neutron agents. In order to do this, the physical I/O must be assigned to the NovaLink partition on the PowerVM system (the partition with virtualization admin authority).
A user should be able to do the standard VIF use cases with either of these agents:
The existing Neutron agents should be used without any changes from PowerVM. All of the changes that should occur will be in nova-powervm. Any limitations of the agents themselves will be limitations to the PowerVM implementation.
There is one exception to the use case support. The Open vSwitch support will enable live migration. There is no plan for Linux Bridges live migration support.
It should be noted that Hybrid VIF plugging will not be supported. Instead, PowerVM will use the conntrack integration in Ubuntu 16.04/OVS 2.5 to support the OVSFirewallDriver. As of OVS 2.5, that allows the firewall function without needing Hybrid VIF Plugging.
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Performance will not be impacted for the deployment of VMs. However, the end user performance may change as it is a new networking technology. Both the Linux Bridge and Open vSwitch support should operate with similar performance characteristics as other platforms that support these technologies.
The deployer will need to do the following:
No major changes are anticipated outside of this. The Shared Ethernet Adapter Neutron agent will not work in conjunction with this on the same system.
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See Proposed Change
Testing will be done on live systems. Future work will be done to integrate into the PowerVM Third-Party CI, however this will not be done initially as the LB and OVS agents are heavily tested. The SEA Agent continues to need to be tested.
Deployer documentation will be built around how to configure this.
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