Today I was waiting for clients to get back to me. While I waited, I started installing OpenStack.
So far it has been going well. A few typos slowed things down. Errors are not always clear, but I am now at the point of installing neutron
This is the scary part. The terrifying part.
Neutron interfaces with Open Virtual Networking (OVN). This could be magical, or it could break everything.
OVN sits on top of Open vSwitch, providing configuration.
The gist is that you install OVS, then you add configuration options to the OVS database. This configuration instructs OVN how to talk to its databases.
Once OVN starts talking to its databases, it performs changes in the OVS database. Those changes affect how OVS routes packets.
The physical network is broken into subnets. This is a requirement for high-availability networking. As links go up and down, the network routes around the failures.
On the other hand, many of the tools I use prefer to be on a single network; subnets increase the complexity greatly. Because of this, I created overlay networks. One for block storage, one for compute nodes, and one for virtual machines.
Neutron could modify the OVN or OVS that brings my overlay networks down.
So I’m well into this terrifying process, and the power goes out. It was only out for a few minutes, but that was enough.
The network came back to life.
All but two servers came back to life. One needs a BIOS change to make it come up after a power failure.
One decided that the new drive must be a boot drive, so it tried to boot from that, failed, and just stopped.
All of that put me behind in research, so nothing interesting in the 2A front to report, even though there are big things happening.
The number of moving parts in a data center is almost overwhelming.