The battle is real, at least in my head.
My physical network is almost fully configured. Each data closet will have an 8-port fiber switch and a 2+4 port RJ45 switch. There is a fiber from the 8-port to router1 and another fiber from the 2+4 to router2. Router1 is cross connected to Router2.
This provides limited redundancy, but I have the ports in the right places to make seamless upgrades. I have one more 8-port switch to install and one more 2+4 switch to install, and all the switches will be installed.
This leaves redundancy. I will be running armored OM4 cables via separate routes from the current cables. Each data closet switch will be connected to 3 other switches. Router1 and two other data closets. When this is completed, it will mean that I will have a ring for the closets reaching back to a star node in the center.
The switches will still be a point of failure, but those are easy replacements.
If a link goes down, either by losing the fiber or the ports or the transceivers, OSPF will automatically route traffic around the down link. The next upgrade will be to put a second switch in each closet and connect the second port up on each NIC to that second switch.
The two switches will be cross-connected but will feed one direction of the star. Once this is completed, losing a switch will just cause a routing reconfiguration, and packets will keep on moving.
A side effect of this will be that there will be more bandwidth between closets. Currently, all nodes can dump at 10 gigabits to the location switch. The switch has a 160-gigabit backbone, so if the traffic stays in the closet, there is no bottleneck. If the traffic is sent to a different data closet, there is a 10-gigabit bottleneck.
Once the ring is in place, We will have a total of 30 gigabits leaving each closet. This might make a huge difference.
That is the simple stuff.
The simpler stuff for me, is getting my OVN network to network correctly.
The gist, I create a logical switch and connect my VMs to it. Each VM creates an interface on the OVS internal bridge. All good. I then create a logical router. This router is attached to the logical switch. From the VM I can ping the VM, the router interface.
I then create another logical switch with a localnet port. We add the router to this switch as well. This gives the router two ports with different IP addresses.
From the VM I can ping the VM’s IP, the router’s IP on the VM network, and the router’s IP on the localnet.
What I can’t do is get the ovn-controller to create the patch in the OVS to move traffic from the localnet port to the physical netwrok.
I don’t understand why, and it is upsetting me.
Time to start the OVN network configuration process over again.