Author: Antxon Gonzalez

VM networks are Virtual Networks which virtual networks that use a VLAN tag on top of the Hypervisors Networks Interfaces physical Networkthe hypervisor's network interfaces on the physical network.

The Physical Network Interfaces physical network interfaces belong to a Network Service Type network service type (NST), which identifies the Network Segment the Interface network segment that the interface is connected to.

To understand Abiquo Cloud networking, you need to take into account these concepts first.

Racks

Before you add an Physical Machine to a Datacentera physical machine to a datacenter, you need to create the Rack rack it will belong to.

A rack is a logical set of Physcal Machines physical machines providing the same level of compute level service.

Each rack also defines also a VLAN pool for all the physical machines inside the rack.

This pool is used to provide Private private networks to Virtual Datacentersvirtual datacenters.

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Network

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service type

Every time you add a Physical Machinephysical machine, you must choose its Rack rack and specify the Network Service Type network service type (NST) its Network Interfaces network interfaces are connected to.

A An NST is a set of Interfaces interfaces providing the same network service level. You may think that of each one is NST as a Network Segment different from the othersdifferent network segment.

VLANs inside a an NST have the same meaning for interfaces in the same rack, while it may VLANs will be different for Interfaces interfaces in different NSTs or Racksracks.

This does not imply that VLANs inside a NST are interconnected, as this depends on the VLAN type.
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Cloud networks

Cloud Networks networks in Abiquo are defined by its their type, network service type (NST), and VLAN tag. This forces means that all VMs using them to run in Hypervisors a network will run on hypervisors with NICs of the corresponding NST.

There will always be a default NST that we call the Service Network, which is the NST that will hold most of the networking workload.

There are three different kind of networks:

• Private: Bound to the

  Virtual Datacenter

  virtual datacenter (VDC) they were created in.
  

  Their VLAN

  The network tag is taken from the

  VLAN

  network tag pool of a rack automatically, bounding the network workload to it.

• External: Bound to a

  Datacenter and an Enterprise

  datacenter and a cloud tenant (enterprise).
  This means that the network VLAN tag has the same meaning for all racks in the

  Datacenter

  datacenter.

• Public: Bound to a

  Datacenter

  datacenter only.
  They are similar to external networks, but

  may be used by different enterprises at the same time

  more than one enterprise may use them.

Private networks are bound to the racks rack they were defined in, and their VLAN network tags have no meaning outside itthis rack. This in fact bounds VDCs means that VDCs are bound to the rack their privates private networks are defined in.

External and public networks instead have the same meaning can be used in all the racks in a datacenter. Their VLAN tag network tags must be defined in the NST infrastructure before defining you define them inside Abiquo.

VMs in the same enterprise may talk to each other communicate through public an and external networks, or private networks is if they belong to the same VDC.

The only way for VMs in different enterprises to talk to each other communicate is through a public network instead.Image Removed

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DHCP

There are two different approaches to get DHCP working on your environment: Regular DHCP infrastructure or Abiquo DNSMasq networking solution.

Both solutions require a DHCP service listening to the Abiquo networks When using SDN systems, such as NSX-T, Abiquo will use the DHCP services of the SDN system.

When you are using standard networking, you can choose between a regular DHCP service or the Abiquo DNSMasq service. Both solutions must listen on the Abiquo virtual networks (with VLAN tags in their NSTs), meaning that the service will need a NIC in each network.

If you have a large number of networks, regular DHCP may require a Relay relay network infrastructure to deal with all networks depending on their number,  while . The DNSMasq solution has no limits to the number of interfaces the server may be listening to.

Additionally, Regular DHCP just requires an OMAPI capable server, as this is the protocol that Abiquo will use to manage the leases for the network environment.

If your datacenter does not have a DHCP service, you can use hypervisor tools or cloud-init to assign network addresses. See Guest setup

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