ovn-architecture(7) OVN Manual ovn-architecture(7)
NAME
ovn-architecture - Open Virtual Network architecture
DESCRIPTION
OVN, the Open Virtual Network, is a system to support logical network
abstraction in virtual machine and container environments. OVN comple‐
ments the existing capabilities of OVS to add native support for logi‐
cal network abstractions, such as logical L2 and L3 overlays and secu‐
rity groups. Services such as DHCP are also desirable features. Just
like OVS, OVN’s design goal is to have a production-quality implementa‐
tion that can operate at significant scale.
A physical network comprises physical wires, switches, and routers. A
virtual network extends a physical network into a hypervisor or con‐
tainer platform, bridging VMs or containers into the physical network.
An OVN logical network is a network implemented in software that is in‐
sulated from physical (and thus virtual) networks by tunnels or other
encapsulations. This allows IP and other address spaces used in logical
networks to overlap with those used on physical networks without caus‐
ing conflicts. Logical network topologies can be arranged without re‐
gard for the topologies of the physical networks on which they run.
Thus, VMs that are part of a logical network can migrate from one phys‐
ical machine to another without network disruption. See Logical Net‐‐
works, below, for more information.
The encapsulation layer prevents VMs and containers connected to a log‐
ical network from communicating with nodes on physical networks. For
clustering VMs and containers, this can be acceptable or even desir‐
able, but in many cases VMs and containers do need connectivity to
physical networks. OVN provides multiple forms of gateways for this
purpose. See Gateways, below, for more information.
An OVN deployment consists of several components:
• A Cloud Management System (CMS), which is OVN’s ultimate
client (via its users and administrators). OVN integra‐
tion requires installing a CMS-specific plugin and re‐
lated software (see below). OVN initially targets Open‐
Stack as CMS.
We generally speak of ``the’’ CMS, but one can imagine
scenarios in which multiple CMSes manage different parts
of an OVN deployment.
• An OVN Database physical or virtual node (or, eventually,
cluster) installed in a central location.
• One or more (usually many) hypervisors. Hypervisors must
run Open vSwitch and implement the interface described in
Documentation/topics/integration.rst in the Open vSwitch
source tree. Any hypervisor platform supported by Open
vSwitch is acceptable.
• Zero or more gateways. A gateway extends a tunnel-based
logical network into a physical network by bidirection‐
ally forwarding packets between tunnels and a physical
Ethernet port. This allows non-virtualized machines to
participate in logical networks. A gateway may be a phys‐
ical host, a virtual machine, or an ASIC-based hardware
switch that supports the vtep(5) schema.
Hypervisors and gateways are together called transport
node or chassis.
The diagram below shows how the major components of OVN and related
software interact. Starting at the top of the diagram, we have:
• The Cloud Management System, as defined above.
• The OVN/CMS Plugin is the component of the CMS that in‐
terfaces to OVN. In OpenStack, this is a Neutron plugin.
The plugin’s main purpose is to translate the CMS’s no‐
tion of logical network configuration, stored in the
CMS’s configuration database in a CMS-specific format,
into an intermediate representation understood by OVN.
This component is necessarily CMS-specific, so a new plu‐
gin needs to be developed for each CMS that is integrated
with OVN. All of the components below this one in the di‐
agram are CMS-independent.
• The OVN Northbound Database receives the intermediate
representation of logical network configuration passed
down by the OVN/CMS Plugin. The database schema is meant
to be ``impedance matched’’ with the concepts used in a
CMS, so that it directly supports notions of logical
switches, routers, ACLs, and so on. See ovn-nb(5) for de‐
tails.
The OVN Northbound Database has only two clients: the
OVN/CMS Plugin above it and ovn-northd below it.
• ovn-northd(8) connects to the OVN Northbound Database
above it and the OVN Southbound Database below it. It
translates the logical network configuration in terms of
conventional network concepts, taken from the OVN North‐
bound Database, into logical datapath flows in the OVN
Southbound Database below it.
• The OVN Southbound Database is the center of the system.
Its clients are ovn-northd(8) above it and ovn-con‐‐
troller(8) on every transport node below it.
The OVN Southbound Database contains three kinds of data:
Physical Network (PN) tables that specify how to reach
hypervisor and other nodes, Logical Network (LN) tables
that describe the logical network in terms of ``logical
datapath flows,’’ and Binding tables that link logical
network components’ locations to the physical network.
The hypervisors populate the PN and Port_Binding tables,
whereas ovn-northd(8) populates the LN tables.
OVN Southbound Database performance must scale with the
number of transport nodes. This will likely require some
work on ovsdb-server(1) as we encounter bottlenecks.
Clustering for availability may be needed.
The remaining components are replicated onto each hypervisor:
• ovn-controller(8) is OVN’s agent on each hypervisor and
software gateway. Northbound, it connects to the OVN
Southbound Database to learn about OVN configuration and
status and to populate the PN table and the Chassis col‐
umn in Binding table with the hypervisor’s status. South‐
bound, it connects to ovs-vswitchd(8) as an OpenFlow con‐
troller, for control over network traffic, and to the lo‐
cal ovsdb-server(1) to allow it to monitor and control
Open vSwitch configuration.
• ovs-vswitchd(8) and ovsdb-server(1) are conventional com‐
ponents of Open vSwitch.
CMS
|
|
+-----------|-----------+
| | |
| OVN/CMS Plugin |
| | |
| | |
| OVN Northbound DB |
| | |
| | |
| ovn-northd |
| | |
+-----------|-----------+
|
|
+-------------------+
| OVN Southbound DB |
+-------------------+
|
|
+------------------+------------------+
| | |
HV 1 | | HV n |
+---------------|---------------+ . +---------------|---------------+
| | | . | | |
| ovn-controller | . | ovn-controller |
| | | | . | | | |
| | | | | | | |
| ovs-vswitchd ovsdb-server | | ovs-vswitchd ovsdb-server |
| | | |
+-------------------------------+ +-------------------------------+
Information Flow in OVN
Configuration data in OVN flows from north to south. The CMS, through
its OVN/CMS plugin, passes the logical network configuration to
ovn-northd via the northbound database. In turn, ovn-northd compiles
the configuration into a lower-level form and passes it to all of the
chassis via the southbound database.
Status information in OVN flows from south to north. OVN currently pro‐
vides only a few forms of status information. First, ovn-northd popu‐
lates the up column in the northbound Logical_Switch_Port table: if a
logical port’s chassis column in the southbound Port_Binding table is
nonempty, it sets up to true, otherwise to false. This allows the CMS
to detect when a VM’s networking has come up.
Second, OVN provides feedback to the CMS on the realization of its con‐
figuration, that is, whether the configuration provided by the CMS has
taken effect. This feature requires the CMS to participate in a se‐
quence number protocol, which works the following way:
1. When the CMS updates the configuration in the northbound
database, as part of the same transaction, it increments the
value of the nb_cfg column in the NB_Global table. (This is
only necessary if the CMS wants to know when the configura‐
tion has been realized.)
2. When ovn-northd updates the southbound database based on a
given snapshot of the northbound database, it copies nb_cfg
from northbound NB_Global into the southbound database
SB_Global table, as part of the same transaction. (Thus, an
observer monitoring both databases can determine when the
southbound database is caught up with the northbound.)
3. After ovn-northd receives confirmation from the southbound
database server that its changes have committed, it updates
sb_cfg in the northbound NB_Global table to the nb_cfg ver‐
sion that was pushed down. (Thus, the CMS or another ob‐
server can determine when the southbound database is caught
up without a connection to the southbound database.)
4. The ovn-controller process on each chassis receives the up‐
dated southbound database, with the updated nb_cfg. This
process in turn updates the physical flows installed in the
chassis’s Open vSwitch instances. When it receives confirma‐
tion from Open vSwitch that the physical flows have been up‐
dated, it updates nb_cfg in its own Chassis record in the
southbound database.
5. ovn-northd monitors the nb_cfg column in all of the Chassis
records in the southbound database. It keeps track of the
minimum value among all the records and copies it into the
hv_cfg column in the northbound NB_Global table. (Thus, the
CMS or another observer can determine when all of the hyper‐
visors have caught up to the northbound configuration.)
Chassis Setup
Each chassis in an OVN deployment must be configured with an Open
vSwitch bridge dedicated for OVN’s use, called the integration bridge.
System startup scripts may create this bridge prior to starting
ovn-controller if desired. If this bridge does not exist when ovn-con‐
troller starts, it will be created automatically with the default con‐
figuration suggested below. The ports on the integration bridge in‐
clude:
• On any chassis, tunnel ports that OVN uses to maintain
logical network connectivity. ovn-controller adds, up‐
dates, and removes these tunnel ports.
• On a hypervisor, any VIFs that are to be attached to log‐
ical networks. For instances connected through software
emulated ports such as TUN/TAP or VETH pairs, the hyper‐
visor itself will normally create ports and plug them
into the integration bridge. For instances connected
through representor ports, typically used with hardware
offload, the ovn-controller may on CMS direction consult
a VIF plug provider for representor port lookup and plug
them into the integration bridge (please refer to Docu‐‐
mentation/top‐‐
ics/vif-plug-providers/vif-plug-providers.rst
for more information). In both cases the conventions de‐
scribed in Documentation/topics/integration.rst in the
Open vSwitch source tree is followed to ensure mapping
between OVN logical port and VIF. (This is pre-existing
integration work that has already been done on hypervi‐
sors that support OVS.)
• On a gateway, the physical port used for logical network
connectivity. System startup scripts add this port to the
bridge prior to starting ovn-controller. This can be a
patch port to another bridge, instead of a physical port,
in more sophisticated setups.
Other ports should not be attached to the integration bridge. In par‐
ticular, physical ports attached to the underlay network (as opposed to
gateway ports, which are physical ports attached to logical networks)
must not be attached to the integration bridge. Underlay physical ports
should instead be attached to a separate Open vSwitch bridge (they need
not be attached to any bridge at all, in fact).
The integration bridge should be configured as described below. The ef‐
fect of each of these settings is documented in
ovs-vswitchd.conf.db(5):
fail-mode=secure
Avoids switching packets between isolated logical net‐
works before ovn-controller starts up. See Controller
Failure Settings in ovs-vsctl(8) for more information.
other-config:disable-in-band=true
Suppresses in-band control flows for the integration
bridge. It would be unusual for such flows to show up
anyway, because OVN uses a local controller (over a Unix
domain socket) instead of a remote controller. It’s pos‐
sible, however, for some other bridge in the same system
to have an in-band remote controller, and in that case
this suppresses the flows that in-band control would or‐
dinarily set up. Refer to the documentation for more in‐
formation.
The customary name for the integration bridge is br-int, but another
name may be used.
Logical Networks
Logical network concepts in OVN include logical switches and logical
routers, the logical version of Ethernet switches and IP routers, re‐
spectively. Like their physical cousins, logical switches and routers
can be connected into sophisticated topologies. Logical switches and
routers are ordinarily purely logical entities, that is, they are not
associated or bound to any physical location, and they are implemented
in a distributed manner at each hypervisor that participates in OVN.
Logical switch ports (LSPs) are points of connectivity into and out of
logical switches. There are many kinds of logical switch ports. The
most ordinary kind represent VIFs, that is, attachment points for VMs
or containers. A VIF logical port is associated with the physical loca‐
tion of its VM, which might change as the VM migrates. (A VIF logical
port can be associated with a VM that is powered down or suspended.
Such a logical port has no location and no connectivity.)
Logical router ports (LRPs) are points of connectivity into and out of
logical routers. A LRP connects a logical router either to a logical
switch or to another logical router. Logical routers only connect to
VMs, containers, and other network nodes indirectly, through logical
switches.
Logical switches and logical routers have distinct kinds of logical
ports, so properly speaking one should usually talk about logical
switch ports or logical router ports. However, an unqualified ``logical
port’’ usually refers to a logical switch port.
When a VM sends a packet to a VIF logical switch port, the Open vSwitch
flow tables simulate the packet’s journey through that logical switch
and any other logical routers and logical switches that it might en‐
counter. This happens without transmitting the packet across any physi‐
cal medium: the flow tables implement all of the switching and routing
decisions and behavior. If the flow tables ultimately decide to output
the packet at a logical port attached to another hypervisor (or another
kind of transport node), then that is the time at which the packet is
encapsulated for physical network transmission and sent.
Logical Switch Port Types
OVN supports a number of kinds of logical switch ports. VIF ports that
connect to VMs or containers, described above, are the most ordinary
kind of LSP. In the OVN northbound database, VIF ports have an empty
string for their type. This section describes some of the additional
port types.
A router logical switch port connects a logical switch to a logical
router, designating a particular LRP as its peer.
A localnet logical switch port bridges a logical switch to a physical
VLAN. A logical switch may have one or more localnet ports. Such a log‐
ical switch is used in two scenarios:
• With one or more router logical switch ports, to attach
L3 gateway routers and distributed gateways to a physical
network.
• With one or more VIF logical switch ports, to attach VMs
or containers directly to a physical network. In this
case, the logical switch is not really logical, since it
is bridged to the physical network rather than insulated
from it, and therefore cannot have independent but over‐
lapping IP address namespaces, etc. A deployment might
nevertheless choose such a configuration to take advan‐
tage of the OVN control plane and features such as port
security and ACLs.
When a logical switch contains multiple localnet ports, the following
is assumed.
• Each chassis has a bridge mapping for one of the localnet
physical networks only.
• To facilitate interconnectivity between VIF ports of the
switch that are located on different chassis with differ‐
ent physical network connectivity, the fabric implements
L3 routing between these adjacent physical network seg‐
ments.
Note: nothing said above implies that a chassis cannot be plugged to
multiple physical networks as long as they belong to different
switches.
A localport logical switch port is a special kind of VIF logical switch
port. These ports are present in every chassis, not bound to any par‐
ticular one. Traffic to such a port will never be forwarded through a
tunnel, and traffic from such a port is expected to be destined only to
the same chassis, typically in response to a request it received. Open‐
Stack Neutron uses a localport port to serve metadata to VMs. A meta‐
data proxy process is attached to this port on every host and all VMs
within the same network will reach it at the same IP/MAC address with‐
out any traffic being sent over a tunnel. For further details, see the
OpenStack documentation for networking-ovn.
LSP types vtep and l2gateway are used for gateways. See Gateways, be‐
low, for more information.
Implementation Details
These concepts are details of how OVN is implemented internally. They
might still be of interest to users and administrators.
Logical datapaths are an implementation detail of logical networks in
the OVN southbound database. ovn-northd translates each logical switch
or router in the northbound database into a logical datapath in the
southbound database Datapath_Binding table.
For the most part, ovn-northd also translates each logical switch port
in the OVN northbound database into a record in the southbound database
Port_Binding table. The latter table corresponds roughly to the north‐
bound Logical_Switch_Port table. It has multiple types of logical port
bindings, of which many types correspond directly to northbound LSP
types. LSP types handled this way include VIF (empty string), localnet,
localport, vtep, and l2gateway.
The Port_Binding table has some types of port binding that do not cor‐
respond directly to logical switch port types. The common is patch port
bindings, known as logical patch ports. These port bindings always oc‐
cur in pairs, and a packet that enters on either side comes out on the
other. ovn-northd connects logical switches and logical routers to‐
gether using logical patch ports.
Port bindings with types vtep, l2gateway, l3gateway, and chassisredi‐‐
rect are used for gateways. These are explained in Gateways, below.
Gateways
Gateways provide limited connectivity between logical networks and
physical ones. They can also provide connectivity between different OVN
deployments. This section will focus on the former, and the latter will
be described in details in section OVN Deployments Interconnection.
OVN support multiple kinds of gateways.
VTEP Gateways
A ``VTEP gateway’’ connects an OVN logical network to a physical (or
virtual) switch that implements the OVSDB VTEP schema that accompanies
Open vSwitch. (The ``VTEP gateway’’ term is a misnomer, since a VTEP is
just a VXLAN Tunnel Endpoint, but it is a well established name.) See
Life Cycle of a VTEP gateway, below, for more information.
The main intended use case for VTEP gateways is to attach physical
servers to an OVN logical network using a physical top-of-rack switch
that supports the OVSDB VTEP schema.
L2 Gateways
A L2 gateway simply attaches a designated physical L2 segment available
on some chassis to a logical network. The physical network effectively
becomes part of the logical network.
To set up a L2 gateway, the CMS adds an l2gateway LSP to an appropriate
logical switch, setting LSP options to name the chassis on which it
should be bound. ovn-northd copies this configuration into a southbound
Port_Binding record. On the designated chassis, ovn-controller forwards
packets appropriately to and from the physical segment.
L2 gateway ports have features in common with localnet ports. However,
with a localnet port, the physical network becomes the transport be‐
tween hypervisors. With an L2 gateway, packets are still transported
between hypervisors over tunnels and the l2gateway port is only used
for the packets that are on the physical network. The application for
L2 gateways is similar to that for VTEP gateways, e.g. to add non-vir‐
tualized machines to a logical network, but L2 gateways do not require
special support from top-of-rack hardware switches.
L3 Gateway Routers
As described above under Logical Networks, ordinary OVN logical routers
are distributed: they are not implemented in a single place but rather
in every hypervisor chassis. This is a problem for stateful services
such as SNAT and DNAT, which need to be implemented in a centralized
manner.
To allow for this kind of functionality, OVN supports L3 gateway
routers, which are OVN logical routers that are implemented in a desig‐
nated chassis. Gateway routers are typically used between distributed
logical routers and physical networks. The distributed logical router
and the logical switches behind it, to which VMs and containers attach,
effectively reside on each hypervisor. The distributed router and the
gateway router are connected by another logical switch, sometimes re‐
ferred to as a ``join’’ logical switch. (OVN logical routers may be
connected to one another directly, without an intervening switch, but
the OVN implementation only supports gateway logical routers that are
connected to logical switches. Using a join logical switch also reduces
the number of IP addresses needed on the distributed router.) On the
other side, the gateway router connects to another logical switch that
has a localnet port connecting to the physical network.
The following diagram shows a typical situation. One or more logical
switches LS1, ..., LSn connect to distributed logical router LR1, which
in turn connects through LSjoin to gateway logical router GLR, which
also connects to logical switch LSlocal, which includes a localnet port
to attach to the physical network.
LSlocal
|
GLR
|
LSjoin
|
LR1
|
+----+----+
| | |
LS1 ... LSn
To configure an L3 gateway router, the CMS sets options:chassis in the
router’s northbound Logical_Router to the chassis’s name. In response,
ovn-northd uses a special l3gateway port binding (instead of a patch
binding) in the southbound database to connect the logical router to
its neighbors. In turn, ovn-controller tunnels packets to this port
binding to the designated L3 gateway chassis, instead of processing
them locally.
DNAT and SNAT rules may be associated with a gateway router, which pro‐
vides a central location that can handle one-to-many SNAT (aka IP mas‐
querading). Distributed gateway ports, described below, also support
NAT.
Distributed Gateway Ports
A distributed gateway port is a logical router port that is specially
configured to designate one distinguished chassis, called the gateway
chassis, for centralized processing. A distributed gateway port should
connect to a logical switch that has an LSP that connects externally,
that is, either a localnet LSP or a connection to another OVN deploy‐
ment (see OVN Deployments Interconnection). Packets that traverse the
distributed gateway port are processed without involving the gateway
chassis when they can be, but when needed they do take an extra hop
through it.
The following diagram illustrates the use of a distributed gateway
port. A number of logical switches LS1, ..., LSn connect to distributed
logical router LR1, which in turn connects through the distributed
gateway port to logical switch LSlocal that includes a localnet port to
attach to the physical network.
LSlocal
|
LR1
|
+----+----+
| | |
LS1 ... LSn
ovn-northd creates two southbound Port_Binding records to represent a
distributed gateway port, instead of the usual one. One of these is a
patch port binding named for the LRP, which is used for as much traffic
as it can. The other one is a port binding with type chassisredirect,
named cr-port. The chassisredirect port binding has one specialized
job: when a packet is output to it, the flow table causes it to be tun‐
neled to the gateway chassis, at which point it is automatically output
to the patch port binding. Thus, the flow table can output to this port
binding in cases where a particular task has to happen on the gateway
chassis. The chassisredirect port binding is not otherwise used (for
example, it never receives packets).
The CMS may configure distributed gateway ports three different ways.
See Distributed Gateway Ports in the documentation for Logi‐‐
cal_Router_Port in ovn-nb(5) for details.
Distributed gateway ports support high availability. When more than one
chassis is specified, OVN only uses one at a time as the gateway chas‐
sis. OVN uses BFD to monitor gateway connectivity, preferring the high‐
est-priority gateway that is online.
A logical router can have multiple distributed gateway ports, each con‐
necting different external networks. However, some features, such as
NAT and load balancers, are not supported yet for logical routers with
more than one distributed gateway port configured.
Physical VLAN MTU Issues
Consider the preceding diagram again:
LSlocal
|
LR1
|
+----+----+
| | |
LS1 ... LSn
Suppose that each logical switch LS1, ..., LSn is bridged to a physical
VLAN-tagged network attached to a localnet port on LSlocal, over a dis‐
tributed gateway port on LR1. If a packet originating on LSi is des‐
tined to the external network, OVN sends it to the gateway chassis over
a tunnel. There, the packet traverses LR1’s logical router pipeline,
possibly undergoes NAT, and eventually ends up at LSlocal’s localnet
port. If all of the physical links in the network have the same MTU,
then the packet’s transit across a tunnel causes an MTU problem: tunnel
overhead prevents a packet that uses the full physical MTU from cross‐
ing the tunnel to the gateway chassis (without fragmentation).
OVN offers two solutions to this problem, the reside-on-redirect-chas‐‐
sis and redirect-type options. Both solutions require each logical
switch LS1, ..., LSn to include a localnet logical switch port LN1,
..., LNn respectively, that is present on each chassis. Both cause
packets to be sent over the localnet ports instead of tunnels. They
differ in which packets-some or all-are sent this way. The most promi‐
nent tradeoff between these options is that reside-on-redirect-chassis
is easier to configure and that redirect-type performs better for east-
west traffic.
The first solution is the reside-on-redirect-chassis option for logical
router ports. Setting this option on a LRP from (e.g.) LS1 to LR1 dis‐
ables forwarding from LS1 to LR1 except on the gateway chassis. On
chassis other than the gateway chassis, this single change means that
packets that would otherwise have been forwarded to LR1 are instead
forwarded to LN1. The instance of LN1 on the gateway chassis then re‐
ceives the packet and forwards it to LR1. The packet traverses the LR1
logical router pipeline, possibly undergoes NAT, and eventually ends up
at LSlocal’s localnet port. The packet never traverses a tunnel, avoid‐
ing the MTU issue.
This option has the further consequence of centralizing ``distributed’’
logical router LR1, since no packets are forwarded from LS1 to LR1 on
any chassis other than the gateway chassis. Therefore, east-west traf‐
fic passes through the gateway chassis, not just north-south. (The
naive ``fix’’ of allowing east-west traffic to flow directly between
chassis over LN1 does not work because routing sets the Ethernet source
address to LR1’s source address. Seeing this single Ethernet source ad‐
dress originate from all of the chassis will confuse the physical
switch.)
Do not set the reside-on-redirect-chassis option on a distributed gate‐
way port. In the diagram above, it would be set on the LRPs connecting
LS1, ..., LSn to LR1.
The second solution is the redirect-type option for distributed gateway
ports. Setting this option to bridged causes packets that are redi‐
rected to the gateway chassis to go over the localnet ports instead of
being tunneled. This option does not change how OVN treats packets not
redirected to the gateway chassis.
The redirect-type option requires the administrator or the CMS to con‐
figure each participating chassis with a unique Ethernet address for
the logical router by setting ovn-chassis-mac-mappings in the Open
vSwitch database, for use by ovn-controller. This makes it more diffi‐
cult to configure than reside-on-redirect-chassis.
Set the redirect-type option on a distributed gateway port.
Using Distributed Gateway Ports For Scalability
Although the primary goal of distributed gateway ports is to provide
connectivity to external networks, there is a special use case for
scalability.
In some deployments, such as the ones using ovn-kubernetes, logical
switches are bound to individual chassises, and are connected by a dis‐
tributed logical router. In such deployments, the chassis level logical
switches are centralized on the chassis instead of distributed, which
means the ovn-controller on each chassis doesn’t need to process flows
and ports of logical switches on other chassises. However, without any
specific hint, ovn-controller would still process all the logical
switches as if they are fully distributed. In this case, distributed
gateway port can be very useful. The chassis level logical switches can
be connected to the distributed router using distributed gateway ports,
by setting the gateway chassis (or HA chassis groups with only a single
chassis in it) to the chassis that each logical switch is bound to.
ovn-controller would then skip processing the logical switches on all
the other chassises, largely improving the scalability, especially when
there are a big number of chassises.
Life Cycle of a VIF
Tables and their schemas presented in isolation are difficult to under‐
stand. Here’s an example.
A VIF on a hypervisor is a virtual network interface attached either to
a VM or a container running directly on that hypervisor (This is dif‐
ferent from the interface of a container running inside a VM).
The steps in this example refer often to details of the OVN and OVN
Northbound database schemas. Please see ovn-sb(5) and ovn-nb(5), re‐
spectively, for the full story on these databases.
1. A VIF’s life cycle begins when a CMS administrator creates a
new VIF using the CMS user interface or API and adds it to a
switch (one implemented by OVN as a logical switch). The CMS
updates its own configuration. This includes associating
unique, persistent identifier vif-id and Ethernet address
mac with the VIF.
2. The CMS plugin updates the OVN Northbound database to in‐
clude the new VIF, by adding a row to the Logi‐‐
cal_Switch_Port table. In the new row, name is vif-id, mac
is mac, switch points to the OVN logical switch’s Logi‐
cal_Switch record, and other columns are initialized appro‐
priately.
3. ovn-northd receives the OVN Northbound database update. In
turn, it makes the corresponding updates to the OVN South‐
bound database, by adding rows to the OVN Southbound data‐
base Logical_Flow table to reflect the new port, e.g. add a
flow to recognize that packets destined to the new port’s
MAC address should be delivered to it, and update the flow
that delivers broadcast and multicast packets to include the
new port. It also creates a record in the Binding table and
populates all its columns except the column that identifies
the chassis.
4. On every hypervisor, ovn-controller receives the Logi‐‐
cal_Flow table updates that ovn-northd made in the previous
step. As long as the VM that owns the VIF is powered off,
ovn-controller cannot do much; it cannot, for example,
arrange to send packets to or receive packets from the VIF,
because the VIF does not actually exist anywhere.
5. Eventually, a user powers on the VM that owns the VIF. On
the hypervisor where the VM is powered on, the integration
between the hypervisor and Open vSwitch (described in Docu‐‐
mentation/topics/integration.rst in the Open vSwitch source
tree) adds the VIF to the OVN integration bridge and stores
vif-id in external_ids:iface-id to indicate that the inter‐
face is an instantiation of the new VIF. (None of this code
is new in OVN; this is pre-existing integration work that
has already been done on hypervisors that support OVS.)
6. On the hypervisor where the VM is powered on, ovn-controller
notices external_ids:iface-id in the new Interface. In re‐
sponse, in the OVN Southbound DB, it updates the Binding ta‐
ble’s chassis column for the row that links the logical port
from external_ids: iface-id to the hypervisor. Afterward,
ovn-controller updates the local hypervisor’s OpenFlow ta‐
bles so that packets to and from the VIF are properly han‐
dled.
7. Some CMS systems, including OpenStack, fully start a VM only
when its networking is ready. To support this, ovn-northd
notices the chassis column updated for the row in Binding
table and pushes this upward by updating the up column in
the OVN Northbound database’s Logical_Switch_Port table to
indicate that the VIF is now up. The CMS, if it uses this
feature, can then react by allowing the VM’s execution to
proceed.
8. On every hypervisor but the one where the VIF resides,
ovn-controller notices the completely populated row in the
Binding table. This provides ovn-controller the physical lo‐
cation of the logical port, so each instance updates the
OpenFlow tables of its switch (based on logical datapath
flows in the OVN DB Logical_Flow table) so that packets to
and from the VIF can be properly handled via tunnels.
9. Eventually, a user powers off the VM that owns the VIF. On
the hypervisor where the VM was powered off, the VIF is
deleted from the OVN integration bridge.
10. On the hypervisor where the VM was powered off, ovn-con‐‐
troller notices that the VIF was deleted. In response, it
removes the Chassis column content in the Binding table for
the logical port.
11. On every hypervisor, ovn-controller notices the empty Chas‐‐
sis column in the Binding table’s row for the logical port.
This means that ovn-controller no longer knows the physical
location of the logical port, so each instance updates its
OpenFlow table to reflect that.
12. Eventually, when the VIF (or its entire VM) is no longer
needed by anyone, an administrator deletes the VIF using the
CMS user interface or API. The CMS updates its own configu‐
ration.
13. The CMS plugin removes the VIF from the OVN Northbound data‐
base, by deleting its row in the Logical_Switch_Port table.
14. ovn-northd receives the OVN Northbound update and in turn
updates the OVN Southbound database accordingly, by removing
or updating the rows from the OVN Southbound database Logi‐‐
cal_Flow table and Binding table that were related to the
now-destroyed VIF.
15. On every hypervisor, ovn-controller receives the Logi‐‐
cal_Flow table updates that ovn-northd made in the previous
step. ovn-controller updates OpenFlow tables to reflect the
update, although there may not be much to do, since the VIF
had already become unreachable when it was removed from the
Binding table in a previous step.
Life Cycle of a Container Interface Inside a VM
OVN provides virtual network abstractions by converting information
written in OVN_NB database to OpenFlow flows in each hypervisor. Secure
virtual networking for multi-tenants can only be provided if OVN con‐
troller is the only entity that can modify flows in Open vSwitch. When
the Open vSwitch integration bridge resides in the hypervisor, it is a
fair assumption to make that tenant workloads running inside VMs cannot
make any changes to Open vSwitch flows.
If the infrastructure provider trusts the applications inside the con‐
tainers not to break out and modify the Open vSwitch flows, then con‐
tainers can be run in hypervisors. This is also the case when contain‐
ers are run inside the VMs and Open vSwitch integration bridge with
flows added by OVN controller resides in the same VM. For both the
above cases, the workflow is the same as explained with an example in
the previous section ("Life Cycle of a VIF").
This section talks about the life cycle of a container interface (CIF)
when containers are created in the VMs and the Open vSwitch integration
bridge resides inside the hypervisor. In this case, even if a container
application breaks out, other tenants are not affected because the con‐
tainers running inside the VMs cannot modify the flows in the Open
vSwitch integration bridge.
When multiple containers are created inside a VM, there are multiple
CIFs associated with them. The network traffic associated with these
CIFs need to reach the Open vSwitch integration bridge running in the
hypervisor for OVN to support virtual network abstractions. OVN should
also be able to distinguish network traffic coming from different CIFs.
There are two ways to distinguish network traffic of CIFs.
One way is to provide one VIF for every CIF (1:1 model). This means
that there could be a lot of network devices in the hypervisor. This
would slow down OVS because of all the additional CPU cycles needed for
the management of all the VIFs. It would also mean that the entity cre‐
ating the containers in a VM should also be able to create the corre‐
sponding VIFs in the hypervisor.
The second way is to provide a single VIF for all the CIFs (1:many
model). OVN could then distinguish network traffic coming from differ‐
ent CIFs via a tag written in every packet. OVN uses this mechanism and
uses VLAN as the tagging mechanism.
1. A CIF’s life cycle begins when a container is spawned inside
a VM by the either the same CMS that created the VM or a
tenant that owns that VM or even a container Orchestration
System that is different than the CMS that initially created
the VM. Whoever the entity is, it will need to know the vif-
id that is associated with the network interface of the VM
through which the container interface’s network traffic is
expected to go through. The entity that creates the con‐
tainer interface will also need to choose an unused VLAN in‐
side that VM.
2. The container spawning entity (either directly or through
the CMS that manages the underlying infrastructure) updates
the OVN Northbound database to include the new CIF, by
adding a row to the Logical_Switch_Port table. In the new
row, name is any unique identifier, parent_name is the vif-
id of the VM through which the CIF’s network traffic is ex‐
pected to go through and the tag is the VLAN tag that iden‐
tifies the network traffic of that CIF.
3. ovn-northd receives the OVN Northbound database update. In
turn, it makes the corresponding updates to the OVN South‐
bound database, by adding rows to the OVN Southbound data‐
base’s Logical_Flow table to reflect the new port and also
by creating a new row in the Binding table and populating
all its columns except the column that identifies the chas‐‐
sis.
4. On every hypervisor, ovn-controller subscribes to the
changes in the Binding table. When a new row is created by
ovn-northd that includes a value in parent_port column of
Binding table, the ovn-controller in the hypervisor whose
OVN integration bridge has that same value in vif-id in ex‐‐
ternal_ids:iface-id updates the local hypervisor’s OpenFlow
tables so that packets to and from the VIF with the particu‐
lar VLAN tag are properly handled. Afterward it updates the
chassis column of the Binding to reflect the physical loca‐
tion.
5. One can only start the application inside the container af‐
ter the underlying network is ready. To support this,
ovn-northd notices the updated chassis column in Binding ta‐
ble and updates the up column in the OVN Northbound data‐
base’s Logical_Switch_Port table to indicate that the CIF is
now up. The entity responsible to start the container appli‐
cation queries this value and starts the application.
6. Eventually the entity that created and started the con‐
tainer, stops it. The entity, through the CMS (or directly)
deletes its row in the Logical_Switch_Port table.
7. ovn-northd receives the OVN Northbound update and in turn
updates the OVN Southbound database accordingly, by removing
or updating the rows from the OVN Southbound database Logi‐‐
cal_Flow table that were related to the now-destroyed CIF.
It also deletes the row in the Binding table for that CIF.
8. On every hypervisor, ovn-controller receives the Logi‐‐
cal_Flow table updates that ovn-northd made in the previous
step. ovn-controller updates OpenFlow tables to reflect the
update.
Architectural Physical Life Cycle of a Packet
This section describes how a packet travels from one virtual machine or
container to another through OVN. This description focuses on the phys‐
ical treatment of a packet; for a description of the logical life cycle
of a packet, please refer to the Logical_Flow table in ovn-sb(5).
This section mentions several data and metadata fields, for clarity
summarized here:
tunnel key
When OVN encapsulates a packet in Geneve or another tun‐
nel, it attaches extra data to it to allow the receiving
OVN instance to process it correctly. This takes differ‐
ent forms depending on the particular encapsulation, but
in each case we refer to it here as the ``tunnel key.’’
See Tunnel Encapsulations, below, for details.
logical datapath field
A field that denotes the logical datapath through which a
packet is being processed. OVN uses the field that Open‐
Flow 1.1+ simply (and confusingly) calls ``metadata’’ to
store the logical datapath. (This field is passed across
tunnels as part of the tunnel key.)
logical input port field
A field that denotes the logical port from which the
packet entered the logical datapath. OVN stores this in
Open vSwitch extension register number 14.
Geneve and STT tunnels pass this field as part of the
tunnel key. Ramp switch VXLAN tunnels do not explicitly
carry a logical input port, but since they are used to
communicate with gateways that from OVN’s perspective
consist of only a single logical port, so that OVN can
set the logical input port field to this one on ingress
to the OVN logical pipeline. As for regular VXLAN tun‐
nels, they don’t carry input port field at all. This puts
additional limitations on cluster capabilities that are
described in Tunnel Encapsulations section.
logical output port field
A field that denotes the logical port from which the
packet will leave the logical datapath. This is initial‐
ized to 0 at the beginning of the logical ingress
pipeline. OVN stores this in Open vSwitch extension reg‐
ister number 15.
Geneve, STT and regular VXLAN tunnels pass this field as
part of the tunnel key. Ramp switch VXLAN tunnels do not
transmit the logical output port field, and since they do
not carry a logical output port field in the tunnel key,
when a packet is received from ramp switch VXLAN tunnel
by an OVN hypervisor, the packet is resubmitted to table
8 to determine the output port(s); when the packet
reaches table 37, these packets are resubmitted to table
38 for local delivery by checking a MLF_RCV_FROM_RAMP
flag, which is set when the packet arrives from a ramp
tunnel.
conntrack zone field for logical ports
A field that denotes the connection tracking zone for
logical ports. The value only has local significance and
is not meaningful between chassis. This is initialized to
0 at the beginning of the logical ingress pipeline. OVN
stores this in Open vSwitch extension register number 13.
conntrack zone fields for routers
Fields that denote the connection tracking zones for
routers. These values only have local significance and
are not meaningful between chassis. OVN stores the zone
information for north to south traffic (for DNATting or
ECMP symmetric replies) in Open vSwitch extension regis‐
ter number 11 and zone information for south to north
traffic (for SNATing) in Open vSwitch extension register
number 12.
logical flow flags
The logical flags are intended to handle keeping context
between tables in order to decide which rules in subse‐
quent tables are matched. These values only have local
significance and are not meaningful between chassis. OVN
stores the logical flags in Open vSwitch extension regis‐
ter number 10.
VLAN ID
The VLAN ID is used as an interface between OVN and con‐
tainers nested inside a VM (see Life Cycle of a container
interface inside a VM, above, for more information).
Initially, a VM or container on the ingress hypervisor sends a packet
on a port attached to the OVN integration bridge. Then:
1. OpenFlow table 0 performs physical-to-logical translation.
It matches the packet’s ingress port. Its actions annotate
the packet with logical metadata, by setting the logical
datapath field to identify the logical datapath that the
packet is traversing and the logical input port field to
identify the ingress port. Then it resubmits to table 8 to
enter the logical ingress pipeline.
Packets that originate from a container nested within a VM
are treated in a slightly different way. The originating
container can be distinguished based on the VIF-specific
VLAN ID, so the physical-to-logical translation flows addi‐
tionally match on VLAN ID and the actions strip the VLAN
header. Following this step, OVN treats packets from con‐
tainers just like any other packets.
Table 0 also processes packets that arrive from other chas‐
sis. It distinguishes them from other packets by ingress
port, which is a tunnel. As with packets just entering the
OVN pipeline, the actions annotate these packets with logi‐
cal datapath metadata. For tunnel types that support it,
they are also annotated with logical ingress port metadata.
In addition, the actions set the logical output port field,
which is available because in OVN tunneling occurs after the
logical output port is known. These pieces of information
are obtained from the tunnel encapsulation metadata (see
Tunnel Encapsulations for encoding details). Then the ac‐
tions resubmit to table 38 to enter the logical egress
pipeline.
2. OpenFlow tables 8 through 31 execute the logical ingress
pipeline from the Logical_Flow table in the OVN Southbound
database. These tables are expressed entirely in terms of
logical concepts like logical ports and logical datapaths. A
big part of ovn-controller’s job is to translate them into
equivalent OpenFlow (in particular it translates the table
numbers: Logical_Flow tables 0 through 23 become OpenFlow
tables 8 through 31).
Each logical flow maps to one or more OpenFlow flows. An ac‐
tual packet ordinarily matches only one of these, although
in some cases it can match more than one of these flows
(which is not a problem because all of them have the same
actions). ovn-controller uses the first 32 bits of the logi‐
cal flow’s UUID as the cookie for its OpenFlow flow or
flows. (This is not necessarily unique, since the first 32
bits of a logical flow’s UUID is not necessarily unique.)
Some logical flows can map to the Open vSwitch ``conjunctive
match’’ extension (see ovs-fields(7)). Flows with a conjunc‐‐
tion action use an OpenFlow cookie of 0, because they can
correspond to multiple logical flows. The OpenFlow flow for
a conjunctive match includes a match on conj_id.
Some logical flows may not be represented in the OpenFlow
tables on a given hypervisor, if they could not be used on
that hypervisor. For example, if no VIF in a logical switch
resides on a given hypervisor, and the logical switch is not
otherwise reachable on that hypervisor (e.g. over a series
of hops through logical switches and routers starting from a
VIF on the hypervisor), then the logical flow may not be
represented there.
Most OVN actions have fairly obvious implementations in
OpenFlow (with OVS extensions), e.g. next; is implemented as
resubmit, field = constant; as set_field. A few are worth
describing in more detail:
output:
Implemented by resubmitting the packet to table 37.
If the pipeline executes more than one output action,
then each one is separately resubmitted to table 37.
This can be used to send multiple copies of the
packet to multiple ports. (If the packet was not mod‐
ified between the output actions, and some of the
copies are destined to the same hypervisor, then us‐
ing a logical multicast output port would save band‐
width between hypervisors.)
get_arp(P, A);
get_nd(P, A);
Implemented by storing arguments into OpenFlow fields,
then resubmitting to table 66, which ovn-controller
populates with flows generated from the MAC_Binding ta‐
ble in the OVN Southbound database. If there is a match
in table 66, then its actions store the bound MAC in
the Ethernet destination address field.
(The OpenFlow actions save and restore the OpenFlow
fields used for the arguments, so that the OVN actions
do not have to be aware of this temporary use.)
put_arp(P, A, E);
put_nd(P, A, E);
Implemented by storing the arguments into OpenFlow
fields, then outputting a packet to ovn-controller,
which updates the MAC_Binding table.
(The OpenFlow actions save and restore the OpenFlow
fields used for the arguments, so that the OVN actions
do not have to be aware of this temporary use.)
R = lookup_arp(P, A, M);
R = lookup_nd(P, A, M);
Implemented by storing arguments into OpenFlow fields,
then resubmitting to table 67, which ovn-controller
populates with flows generated from the MAC_Binding ta‐
ble in the OVN Southbound database. If there is a match
in table 67, then its actions set the logical flow flag
MLF_LOOKUP_MAC.
(The OpenFlow actions save and restore the OpenFlow
fields used for the arguments, so that the OVN actions
do not have to be aware of this temporary use.)
3. OpenFlow tables 37 through 39 implement the output action in
the logical ingress pipeline. Specifically, table 37 handles
packets to remote hypervisors, table 38 handles packets to
the local hypervisor, and table 39 checks whether packets
whose logical ingress and egress port are the same should be
discarded.
Logical patch ports are a special case. Logical patch ports
do not have a physical location and effectively reside on
every hypervisor. Thus, flow table 38, for output to ports
on the local hypervisor, naturally implements output to uni‐
cast logical patch ports too. However, applying the same
logic to a logical patch port that is part of a logical mul‐
ticast group yields packet duplication, because each hyper‐
visor that contains a logical port in the multicast group
will also output the packet to the logical patch port. Thus,
multicast groups implement output to logical patch ports in
table 37.
Each flow in table 37 matches on a logical output port for
unicast or multicast logical ports that include a logical
port on a remote hypervisor. Each flow’s actions implement
sending a packet to the port it matches. For unicast logical
output ports on remote hypervisors, the actions set the tun‐
nel key to the correct value, then send the packet on the
tunnel port to the correct hypervisor. (When the remote hy‐
pervisor receives the packet, table 0 there will recognize
it as a tunneled packet and pass it along to table 38.) For
multicast logical output ports, the actions send one copy of
the packet to each remote hypervisor, in the same way as for
unicast destinations. If a multicast group includes a logi‐
cal port or ports on the local hypervisor, then its actions
also resubmit to table 38. Table 37 also includes:
• A higher-priority rule to match packets received from
ramp switch tunnels, based on flag MLF_RCV_FROM_RAMP,
and resubmit these packets to table 38 for local de‐
livery. Packets received from ramp switch tunnels
reach here because of a lack of logical output port
field in the tunnel key and thus these packets needed
to be submitted to table 8 to determine the output
port.
• A higher-priority rule to match packets received from
ports of type localport, based on the logical input
port, and resubmit these packets to table 38 for lo‐
cal delivery. Ports of type localport exist on every
hypervisor and by definition their traffic should
never go out through a tunnel.
• A higher-priority rule to match packets that have the
MLF_LOCAL_ONLY logical flow flag set, and whose des‐
tination is a multicast address. This flag indicates
that the packet should not be delivered to remote hy‐
pervisors, even if the multicast destination includes
ports on remote hypervisors. This flag is used when
ovn-controller is the originator of the multicast
packet. Since each ovn-controller instance is origi‐
nating these packets, the packets only need to be de‐
livered to local ports.
• A fallback flow that resubmits to table 38 if there
is no other match.
Flows in table 38 resemble those in table 37 but for logical
ports that reside locally rather than remotely. For unicast
logical output ports on the local hypervisor, the actions
just resubmit to table 39. For multicast output ports that
include one or more logical ports on the local hypervisor,
for each such logical port P, the actions change the logical
output port to P, then resubmit to table 39.
A special case is that when a localnet port exists on the
datapath, remote port is connected by switching to the lo‐
calnet port. In this case, instead of adding a flow in table
37 to reach the remote port, a flow is added in table 38 to
switch the logical outport to the localnet port, and resub‐
mit to table 38 as if it were unicasted to a logical port on
the local hypervisor.
Table 39 matches and drops packets for which the logical in‐
put and output ports are the same and the MLF_ALLOW_LOOPBACK
flag is not set. It also drops MLF_LOCAL_ONLY packets di‐
rected to a localnet port. It resubmits other packets to ta‐
ble 40.
4. OpenFlow tables 40 through 63 execute the logical egress
pipeline from the Logical_Flow table in the OVN Southbound
database. The egress pipeline can perform a final stage of
validation before packet delivery. Eventually, it may exe‐
cute an output action, which ovn-controller implements by
resubmitting to table 64. A packet for which the pipeline
never executes output is effectively dropped (although it
may have been transmitted through a tunnel across a physical
network).
The egress pipeline cannot change the logical output port or
cause further tunneling.
5. Table 64 bypasses OpenFlow loopback when MLF_ALLOW_LOOPBACK
is set. Logical loopback was handled in table 39, but Open‐
Flow by default also prevents loopback to the OpenFlow
ingress port. Thus, when MLF_ALLOW_LOOPBACK is set, OpenFlow
table 64 saves the OpenFlow ingress port, sets it to zero,
resubmits to table 65 for logical-to-physical transforma‐
tion, and then restores the OpenFlow ingress port, effec‐
tively disabling OpenFlow loopback prevents. When MLF_AL‐
LOW_LOOPBACK is unset, table 64 flow simply resubmits to ta‐
ble 65.
6. OpenFlow table 65 performs logical-to-physical translation,
the opposite of table 0. It matches the packet’s logical
egress port. Its actions output the packet to the port at‐
tached to the OVN integration bridge that represents that
logical port. If the logical egress port is a container
nested with a VM, then before sending the packet the actions
push on a VLAN header with an appropriate VLAN ID.
Logical Routers and Logical Patch Ports
Typically logical routers and logical patch ports do not have a physi‐
cal location and effectively reside on every hypervisor. This is the
case for logical patch ports between logical routers and logical
switches behind those logical routers, to which VMs (and VIFs) attach.
Consider a packet sent from one virtual machine or container to another
VM or container that resides on a different subnet. The packet will
traverse tables 0 to 65 as described in the previous section Architec‐‐
tural Physical Life Cycle of a Packet, using the logical datapath rep‐
resenting the logical switch that the sender is attached to. At table
37, the packet will use the fallback flow that resubmits locally to ta‐
ble 38 on the same hypervisor. In this case, all of the processing from
table 0 to table 65 occurs on the hypervisor where the sender resides.
When the packet reaches table 65, the logical egress port is a logical
patch port. ovn-controller implements output to the logical patch is
packet by cloning and resubmitting directly to the first OpenFlow flow
table in the ingress pipeline, setting the logical ingress port to the
peer logical patch port, and using the peer logical patch port’s logi‐
cal datapath (that represents the logical router).
The packet re-enters the ingress pipeline in order to traverse tables 8
to 65 again, this time using the logical datapath representing the log‐
ical router. The processing continues as described in the previous sec‐
tion Architectural Physical Life Cycle of a Packet. When the packet
reachs table 65, the logical egress port will once again be a logical
patch port. In the same manner as described above, this logical patch
port will cause the packet to be resubmitted to OpenFlow tables 8 to
65, this time using the logical datapath representing the logical
switch that the destination VM or container is attached to.
The packet traverses tables 8 to 65 a third and final time. If the des‐
tination VM or container resides on a remote hypervisor, then table 37
will send the packet on a tunnel port from the sender’s hypervisor to
the remote hypervisor. Finally table 65 will output the packet directly
to the destination VM or container.
The following sections describe two exceptions, where logical routers
and/or logical patch ports are associated with a physical location.
Gateway Routers
A gateway router is a logical router that is bound to a physical loca‐
tion. This includes all of the logical patch ports of the logical
router, as well as all of the peer logical patch ports on logical
switches. In the OVN Southbound database, the Port_Binding entries for
these logical patch ports use the type l3gateway rather than patch, in
order to distinguish that these logical patch ports are bound to a
chassis.
When a hypervisor processes a packet on a logical datapath representing
a logical switch, and the logical egress port is a l3gateway port rep‐
resenting connectivity to a gateway router, the packet will match a
flow in table 37 that sends the packet on a tunnel port to the chassis
where the gateway router resides. This processing in table 37 is done
in the same manner as for VIFs.
Distributed Gateway Ports
This section provides additional details on distributed gateway ports,
outlined earlier.
The primary design goal of distributed gateway ports is to allow as
much traffic as possible to be handled locally on the hypervisor where
a VM or container resides. Whenever possible, packets from the VM or
container to the outside world should be processed completely on that
VM’s or container’s hypervisor, eventually traversing a localnet port
instance or a tunnel to the physical network or a different OVN deploy‐
ment. Whenever possible, packets from the outside world to a VM or con‐
tainer should be directed through the physical network directly to the
VM’s or container’s hypervisor.
In order to allow for the distributed processing of packets described
in the paragraph above, distributed gateway ports need to be logical
patch ports that effectively reside on every hypervisor, rather than
l3gateway ports that are bound to a particular chassis. However, the
flows associated with distributed gateway ports often need to be asso‐
ciated with physical locations, for the following reasons:
• The physical network that the localnet port is attached
to typically uses L2 learning. Any Ethernet address used
over the distributed gateway port must be restricted to a
single physical location so that upstream L2 learning is
not confused. Traffic sent out the distributed gateway
port towards the localnet port with a specific Ethernet
address must be sent out one specific instance of the
distributed gateway port on one specific chassis. Traffic
received from the localnet port (or from a VIF on the
same logical switch as the localnet port) with a specific
Ethernet address must be directed to the logical switch’s
patch port instance on that specific chassis.
Due to the implications of L2 learning, the Ethernet ad‐
dress and IP address of the distributed gateway port need
to be restricted to a single physical location. For this
reason, the user must specify one chassis associated with
the distributed gateway port. Note that traffic travers‐
ing the distributed gateway port using other Ethernet ad‐
dresses and IP addresses (e.g. one-to-one NAT) is not re‐
stricted to this chassis.
Replies to ARP and ND requests must be restricted to a
single physical location, where the Ethernet address in
the reply resides. This includes ARP and ND replies for
the IP address of the distributed gateway port, which are
restricted to the chassis that the user associated with
the distributed gateway port.
• In order to support one-to-many SNAT (aka IP masquerad‐
ing), where multiple logical IP addresses spread across
multiple chassis are mapped to a single external IP ad‐
dress, it will be necessary to handle some of the logical
router processing on a specific chassis in a centralized
manner. Since the SNAT external IP address is typically
the distributed gateway port IP address, and for simplic‐
ity, the same chassis associated with the distributed
gateway port is used.
The details of flow restrictions to specific chassis are described in
the ovn-northd documentation.
While most of the physical location dependent aspects of distributed
gateway ports can be handled by restricting some flows to specific
chassis, one additional mechanism is required. When a packet leaves the
ingress pipeline and the logical egress port is the distributed gateway
port, one of two different sets of actions is required at table 37:
• If the packet can be handled locally on the sender’s hy‐
pervisor (e.g. one-to-one NAT traffic), then the packet
should just be resubmitted locally to table 38, in the
normal manner for distributed logical patch ports.
• However, if the packet needs to be handled on the chassis
associated with the distributed gateway port (e.g. one-
to-many SNAT traffic or non-NAT traffic), then table 37
must send the packet on a tunnel port to that chassis.
In order to trigger the second set of actions, the chassisredirect type
of southbound Port_Binding has been added. Setting the logical egress
port to the type chassisredirect logical port is simply a way to indi‐
cate that although the packet is destined for the distributed gateway
port, it needs to be redirected to a different chassis. At table 37,
packets with this logical egress port are sent to a specific chassis,
in the same way that table 37 directs packets whose logical egress port
is a VIF or a type l3gateway port to different chassis. Once the packet
arrives at that chassis, table 38 resets the logical egress port to the
value representing the distributed gateway port. For each distributed
gateway port, there is one type chassisredirect port, in addition to
the distributed logical patch port representing the distributed gateway
port.
High Availability for Distributed Gateway Ports
OVN allows you to specify a prioritized list of chassis for a distrib‐
uted gateway port. This is done by associating multiple Gateway_Chassis
rows with a Logical_Router_Port in the OVN_Northbound database.
When multiple chassis have been specified for a gateway, all chassis
that may send packets to that gateway will enable BFD on tunnels to all
configured gateway chassis. The current master chassis for the gateway
is the highest priority gateway chassis that is currently viewed as ac‐
tive based on BFD status.
For more information on L3 gateway high availability, please refer to
http://docs.ovn.org/en/latest/topics/high-availability.html.
Restrictions of Distributed Gateway Ports
Distributed gateway ports are used to connect to an external network,
which can be a physical network modeled by a logical switch with a lo‐
calnet port, and can also be a logical switch that interconnects dif‐
ferent OVN deployments (see OVN Deployments Interconnection). Usually
there can be many logical routers connected to the same external logi‐
cal switch, as shown in below diagram.
+--LS-EXT-+
| | |
| | |
LR1 ... LRn
In this diagram, there are n logical routers connected to a logical
switch LS-EXT, each with a distributed gateway port, so that traffic
sent to external world is redirected to the gateway chassis that is as‐
signed to the distributed gateway port of respective logical router.
In the logical topology, nothing can prevent an user to add a route be‐
tween the logical routers via the connected distributed gateway ports
on LS-EXT. However, the route works only if the LS-EXT is a physical
network (modeled by a logical switch with a localnet port). In that
case the packet will be delivered between the gateway chassises through
the localnet port via physical network. If the LS-EXT is a regular log‐
ical switch (backed by tunneling only, as in the use case of OVN inter‐
connection), then the packet will be dropped on the source gateway
chassis. The limitation is due the fact that distributed gateway ports
are tied to physical location, and without physical network connection,
we will end up with either dropping the packet or transferring it over
the tunnels which could cause bigger problems such as broadcast packets
being redirect repeatedly by different gateway chassises.
With the limitation in mind, if a user do want the direct connectivity
between the logical routers, it is better to create an internal logical
switch connected to the logical routers with regular logical router
ports, which are completely distributed and the packets don’t have to
leave a chassis unless necessary, which is more optimal than routing
via the distributed gateway ports.
ARP request and ND NS packet processing
Due to the fact that ARP requests and ND NA packets are usually broad‐
cast packets, for performance reasons, OVN deals with requests that
target OVN owned IP addresses (i.e., IP addresses configured on the
router ports, VIPs, NAT IPs) in a specific way and only forwards them
to the logical router that owns the target IP address. This behavior is
different than that of traditional switches and implies that other
routers/hosts connected to the logical switch will not learn the MAC/IP
binding from the request packet.
All other ARP and ND packets are flooded in the L2 broadcast domain and
to all attached logical patch ports.
VIFs on the logical switch connected by a distributed gateway port
Typically the logical switch connected by a distributed gateway port is
for external connectivity, usually to a physical network through a lo‐
calnet port on the logical switch, or to a remote OVN deployment
through OVN Interconnection. In these cases there is no VIF ports re‐
quired on the logical switch.
While not very common, it is still possible to create VIF ports on the
logical switch connected by a distributed gateway port, but there is a
limitation that the logical ports need to reside on the gateway chassis
where the distributed gateway port resides to get connectivity to other
logical switches through the distributed gateway port. There is no lim‐
itation for the VIFs to connect within the logical switch, or beyond
the logical switch through other regular distributed logical router
ports.
A special case is when using distributed gateway ports for scalability
purpose, as mentioned earlier in this document. The logical switches
connected by distributed gateway ports are not for connectivity but
just for regular VIFs. However, the above limitation usually does not
matter because in this use case all the VIFs on the logical switch are
located on the same chassis with the distributed gateway port that con‐
nects the logical switch.
Multiple localnet logical switches connected to a Logical Router
It is possible to have multiple logical switches each with a localnet
port (representing physical networks) connected to a logical router, in
which one localnet logical switch may provide the external connectivity
via a distributed gateway port and rest of the localnet logical
switches use VLAN tagging in the physical network. It is expected that
ovn-bridge-mappings is configured appropriately on the chassis for all
these localnet networks.
East West routing
East-West routing between these localnet VLAN tagged logical switches
work almost the same way as normal logical switches. When the VM sends
such a packet, then:
1. It first enters the ingress pipeline, and then egress
pipeline of the source localnet logical switch datapath. It
then enters the ingress pipeline of the logical router data‐
path via the logical router port in the source chassis.
2. Routing decision is taken.
3. From the router datapath, packet enters the ingress pipeline
and then egress pipeline of the destination localnet logical
switch datapath and goes out of the integration bridge to
the provider bridge ( belonging to the destination logical
switch) via the localnet port. While sending the packet to
provider bridge, we also replace router port MAC as source
MAC with a chassis unique MAC.
This chassis unique MAC is configured as global ovs config
on each chassis (eg. via "ovs-vsctl set open . external-ids:
ovn-chassis-mac-mappings="phys:aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:$i$i""). For
more details, see ovn-controller(8).
If the above is not configured, then source MAC would be the
router port MAC. This could create problem if we have more
than one chassis. This is because, since the router port is
distributed, the same (MAC,VLAN) tuple will seen by physical
network from other chassis as well, which could cause these
issues:
• Continuous MAC moves in top-of-rack switch (ToR).
• ToR dropping the traffic, which is causing continuous
MAC moves.
• ToR blocking the ports from which MAC moves are hap‐
pening.
4. The destination chassis receives the packet via the localnet
port and sends it to the integration bridge. Before entering
the integration bridge the source mac of the packet will be
replaced with router port mac again. The packet enters the
ingress pipeline and then egress pipeline of the destination
localnet logical switch and finally gets delivered to the
destination VM port.
External traffic
The following happens when a VM sends an external traffic (which re‐
quires NATting) and the chassis hosting the VM doesn’t have a distrib‐
uted gateway port.
1. The packet first enters the ingress pipeline, and then
egress pipeline of the source localnet logical switch data‐
path. It then enters the ingress pipeline of the logical
router datapath via the logical router port in the source
chassis.
2. Routing decision is taken. Since the gateway router or the
distributed gateway port doesn’t reside in the source chas‐
sis, the traffic is redirected to the gateway chassis via
the tunnel port.
3. The gateway chassis receives the packet via the tunnel port
and the packet enters the egress pipeline of the logical
router datapath. NAT rules are applied here. The packet then
enters the ingress pipeline and then egress pipeline of the
localnet logical switch datapath which provides external
connectivity and finally goes out via the localnet port of
the logical switch which provides external connectivity.
Although this works, the VM traffic is tunnelled when sent from the
compute chassis to the gateway chassis. In order for it to work prop‐
erly, the MTU of the localnet logical switches must be lowered to ac‐
count for the tunnel encapsulation.
Centralized routing for localnet VLAN tagged logical switches connected to
a Logical Router
To overcome the tunnel encapsulation problem described in the previous
section, OVN supports the option of enabling centralized routing for
localnet VLAN tagged logical switches. CMS can configure the option op‐‐
tions:reside-on-redirect-chassis to true for each Logical_Router_Port
which connects to the localnet VLAN tagged logical switches. This
causes the gateway chassis (hosting the distributed gateway port) to
handle all the routing for these networks, making it centralized. It
will reply to the ARP requests for the logical router port IPs.
If the logical router doesn’t have a distributed gateway port connect‐
ing to the localnet logical switch which provides external connectiv‐
ity, or if it has more than one distributed gateway ports, then this
option is ignored by OVN.
The following happens when a VM sends an east-west traffic which needs
to be routed:
1. The packet first enters the ingress pipeline, and then
egress pipeline of the source localnet logical switch data‐
path and is sent out via a localnet port of the source lo‐
calnet logical switch (instead of sending it to router
pipeline).
2. The gateway chassis receives the packet via a localnet port
of the source localnet logical switch and sends it to the
integration bridge. The packet then enters the ingress
pipeline, and then egress pipeline of the source localnet
logical switch datapath and enters the ingress pipeline of
the logical router datapath.
3. Routing decision is taken.
4. From the router datapath, packet enters the ingress pipeline
and then egress pipeline of the destination localnet logical
switch datapath. It then goes out of the integration bridge
to the provider bridge ( belonging to the destination logi‐
cal switch) via a localnet port.
5. The destination chassis receives the packet via a localnet
port and sends it to the integration bridge. The packet en‐
ters the ingress pipeline and then egress pipeline of the
destination localnet logical switch and finally delivered to
the destination VM port.
The following happens when a VM sends an external traffic which re‐
quires NATting:
1. The packet first enters the ingress pipeline, and then
egress pipeline of the source localnet logical switch data‐
path and is sent out via a localnet port of the source lo‐
calnet logical switch (instead of sending it to router
pipeline).
2. The gateway chassis receives the packet via a localnet port
of the source localnet logical switch and sends it to the
integration bridge. The packet then enters the ingress
pipeline, and then egress pipeline of the source localnet
logical switch datapath and enters the ingress pipeline of
the logical router datapath.
3. Routing decision is taken and NAT rules are applied.
4. From the router datapath, packet enters the ingress pipeline
and then egress pipeline of the localnet logical switch
datapath which provides external connectivity. It then goes
out of the integration bridge to the provider bridge (be‐
longing to the logical switch which provides external con‐
nectivity) via a localnet port.
The following happens for the reverse external traffic.
1. The gateway chassis receives the packet from a localnet port
of the logical switch which provides external connectivity.
The packet then enters the ingress pipeline and then egress
pipeline of the localnet logical switch (which provides ex‐
ternal connectivity). The packet then enters the ingress
pipeline of the logical router datapath.
2. The ingress pipeline of the logical router datapath applies
the unNATting rules. The packet then enters the ingress
pipeline and then egress pipeline of the source localnet
logical switch. Since the source VM doesn’t reside in the
gateway chassis, the packet is sent out via a localnet port
of the source logical switch.
3. The source chassis receives the packet via a localnet port
and sends it to the integration bridge. The packet enters
the ingress pipeline and then egress pipeline of the source
localnet logical switch and finally gets delivered to the
source VM port.
As an alternative to reside-on-redirect-chassis, OVN supports VLAN-
based redirection. Whereas reside-on-redirect-chassis centralizes all
router functionality, VLAN-based redirection only changes how OVN redi‐
rects packets to the gateway chassis. By setting options:redirect-type
to bridged on a distributed gateway port, OVN redirects packets to the
gateway chassis using the localnet port of the router’s peer logical
switch, instead of a tunnel.
If the logical router doesn’t have a distributed gateway port connect‐
ing to the localnet logical switch which provides external connectiv‐
ity, or if it has more than one distributed gateway ports, then this
option is ignored by OVN.
Following happens for bridged redirection:
1. On compute chassis, packet passes though logical router’s
ingress pipeline.
2. If logical outport is gateway chassis attached router port
then packet is "redirected" to gateway chassis using peer
logical switch’s localnet port.
3. This redirected packet has destination mac as router port
mac (the one to which gateway chassis is attached). Its VLAN
id is that of localnet port (peer logical switch of the log‐
ical router port).
4. On the gateway chassis packet will enter the logical router
pipeline again and this time it will passthrough egress
pipeline as well.
5. Reverse traffic packet flows stays the same.
Some guidelines and expections with bridged redirection:
1. Since router port mac is destination mac, hence it has to be
ensured that physical network learns it on ONLY from the
gateway chassis. Which means that ovn-chassis-mac-mappings
should be configure on all the compute nodes, so that physi‐
cal network never learn router port mac from compute nodes.
2. Since packet enters logical router ingress pipeline twice
(once on compute chassis and again on gateway chassis),
hence ttl will be decremented twice.
3. Default redirection type continues to be overlay. User can
switch the redirect-type between bridged and overlay by
changing the value of options:redirect-type
Life Cycle of a VTEP gateway
A gateway is a chassis that forwards traffic between the OVN-managed
part of a logical network and a physical VLAN, extending a tunnel-based
logical network into a physical network.
The steps below refer often to details of the OVN and VTEP database
schemas. Please see ovn-sb(5), ovn-nb(5) and vtep(5), respectively, for
the full story on these databases.
1. A VTEP gateway’s life cycle begins with the administrator
registering the VTEP gateway as a Physical_Switch table en‐
try in the VTEP database. The ovn-controller-vtep connected
to this VTEP database, will recognize the new VTEP gateway
and create a new Chassis table entry for it in the
OVN_Southbound database.
2. The administrator can then create a new Logical_Switch table
entry, and bind a particular vlan on a VTEP gateway’s port
to any VTEP logical switch. Once a VTEP logical switch is
bound to a VTEP gateway, the ovn-controller-vtep will detect
it and add its name to the vtep_logical_switches column of
the Chassis table in the OVN_Southbound database. Note, the
tunnel_key column of VTEP logical switch is not filled at
creation. The ovn-controller-vtep will set the column when
the correponding vtep logical switch is bound to an OVN log‐
ical network.
3. Now, the administrator can use the CMS to add a VTEP logical
switch to the OVN logical network. To do that, the CMS must
first create a new Logical_Switch_Port table entry in the
OVN_Northbound database. Then, the type column of this entry
must be set to "vtep". Next, the vtep-logical-switch and
vtep-physical-switch keys in the options column must also be
specified, since multiple VTEP gateways can attach to the
same VTEP logical switch. Next, the addresses column of this
logical port must be set to "unknown", it will add a prior‐
ity 0 entry in "ls_in_l2_lkup" stage of logical switch
ingress pipeline. So, traffic with unrecorded mac by OVN
would go through the Logical_Switch_Port to physical net‐
work.
4. The newly created logical port in the OVN_Northbound data‐
base and its configuration will be passed down to the
OVN_Southbound database as a new Port_Binding table entry.
The ovn-controller-vtep will recognize the change and bind
the logical port to the corresponding VTEP gateway chassis.
Configuration of binding the same VTEP logical switch to a
different OVN logical networks is not allowed and a warning
will be generated in the log.
5. Beside binding to the VTEP gateway chassis, the ovn-con‐‐
troller-vtep will update the tunnel_key column of the VTEP
logical switch to the corresponding Datapath_Binding table
entry’s tunnel_key for the bound OVN logical network.
6. Next, the ovn-controller-vtep will keep reacting to the con‐
figuration change in the Port_Binding in the OVN_Northbound
database, and updating the Ucast_Macs_Remote table in the
VTEP database. This allows the VTEP gateway to understand
where to forward the unicast traffic coming from the ex‐
tended external network.
7. Eventually, the VTEP gateway’s life cycle ends when the ad‐
ministrator unregisters the VTEP gateway from the VTEP data‐
base. The ovn-controller-vtep will recognize the event and
remove all related configurations (Chassis table entry and
port bindings) in the OVN_Southbound database.
8. When the ovn-controller-vtep is terminated, all related con‐
figurations in the OVN_Southbound database and the VTEP
database will be cleaned, including Chassis table entries
for all registered VTEP gateways and their port bindings,
and all Ucast_Macs_Remote table entries and the Logi‐‐
cal_Switch tunnel keys.
OVN Deployments Interconnection
It is not uncommon for an operator to deploy multiple OVN clusters, for
two main reasons. Firstly, an operator may prefer to deploy one OVN
cluster for each availability zone, e.g. in different physical regions,
to avoid single point of failure. Secondly, there is always an upper
limit for a single OVN control plane to scale.
Although the control planes of the different availability zone (AZ)s
are independent from each other, the workloads from different AZs may
need to communicate across the zones. The OVN interconnection feature
provides a native way to interconnect different AZs by L3 routing
through transit overlay networks between logical routers of different
AZs.
A global OVN Interconnection Northbound database is introduced for the
operator (probably through CMS systems) to configure transit logical
switches that connect logical routers from different AZs. A transit
switch is similar to a regular logical switch, but it is used for in‐
terconnection purpose only. Typically, each transit switch can be used
to connect all logical routers that belong to same tenant across all
AZs.
A dedicated daemon process ovn-ic, OVN interconnection controller, in
each AZ will consume this data and populate corresponding logical
switches to their own northbound databases for each AZ, so that logical
routers can be connected to the transit switch by creating patch port
pairs in their northbound databases. Any router ports connected to the
transit switches are considered interconnection ports, which will be
exchanged between AZs.
Physically, when workloads from different AZs communicate, packets need
to go through multiple hops: source chassis, source gateway, destina‐
tion gateway and destination chassis. All these hops are connected
through tunnels so that the packets never leave overlay networks. A
distributed gateway port is required to connect the logical router to a
transit switch, with a gateway chassis specified, so that the traffic
can be forwarded through the gateway chassis.
A global OVN Interconnection Southbound database is introduced for ex‐
changing control plane information between the AZs. The data in this
database is populated and consumed by the ovn-ic, of each AZ. The main
information in this database includes:
• Datapath bindings for transit switches, which mainly con‐
tains the tunnel keys generated for each transit switch.
Separate key ranges are reserved for transit switches so
that they will never conflict with any tunnel keys lo‐
cally assigned for datapaths within each AZ.
• Availability zones, which are registerd by ovn-ic from
each AZ.
• Gateways. Each AZ specifies chassises that are supposed
to work as interconnection gateways, and the ovn-ic will
populate this information to the interconnection south‐
bound DB. The ovn-ic from all the other AZs will learn
the gateways and populate to their own southbound DB as a
chassis.
• Port bindings for logical switch ports created on the
transit switch. Each AZ maintains their logical router to
transit switch connections independently, but ovn-ic au‐
tomatically populates local port bindings on transit
switches to the global interconnection southbound DB, and
learns remote port bindings from other AZs back to its
own northbound and southbound DBs, so that logical flows
can be produced and then translated to OVS flows locally,
which finally enables data plane communication.
• Routes that are advertised between different AZs. If en‐
abled, routes are automatically exchanged by ovn-ic. Both
static routes and directly connected subnets are adver‐
tised. Options in options column of the NB_Global table
of OVN_NB database control the behavior of route adver‐
tisement, such as enable/disable the advertising/learning
routes, whether default routes are advertised/learned,
and blacklisted CIDRs. See ovn-nb(5) for more details.
The tunnel keys for transit switch datapaths and related port bindings
must be agreed across all AZs. This is ensured by generating and stor‐
ing the keys in the global interconnection southbound database. Any
ovn-ic from any AZ can allocate the key, but race conditions are solved
by enforcing unique index for the column in the database.
Once each AZ’s NB and SB databases are populated with interconnection
switches and ports, and agreed upon the tunnel keys, data plane commu‐
nication between the AZs are established.
When VXLAN tunneling is enabled in an OVN cluster, due to the limited
range available for VNIs, Interconnection feature is not supported.
A day in the life of a packet crossing AZs
1. An IP packet is sent out from a VIF on a hypervisor (HV1) of
AZ1, with destination IP belonging to a VIF in AZ2.
2. In HV1’s OVS flow tables, the packet goes through logical
switch and logical router pipelines, and in a logical router
pipeline, the routing stage finds out the next hop for the
destination IP, which belongs to a remote logical router
port in AZ2, and the output port, which is a chassis-redi‐
rect port located on an interconnection gateway (GW1 in
AZ1), so HV1 sends the packet to GW1 through tunnel.
3. On GW1, it continues with the logical router pipe line and
switches to the transit switch’s pipeline through the peer
port of the chassis redirect port. In the transit switch’s
pipeline it outputs to the remote logical port which is lo‐
cated on a gateway (GW2) in AZ2, so the GW1 sends the packet
to GW2 in tunnel.
4. On GW2, it continues with the transit switch pipeline and
switches to the logical router pipeline through the peer
port, which is a chassis redirect port that is located on
GW2. The logical router pipeline then forwards the packet to
relevant logical pipelines according to the destination IP
address, and figures out the MAC and location of the desti‐
nation VIF port - a hypervisor (HV2). The GW2 then sends the
packet to HV2 in tunnel.
5. On HV2, the packet is delivered to the final destination VIF
port by the logical switch egress pipeline, just the same
way as for intra-AZ communications.
Native OVN services for external logical ports
To support OVN native services (like DHCP/IPv6 RA/DNS lookup) to the
cloud resources which are external, OVN supports external logical
ports.
Below are some of the use cases where external ports can be used.
• VMs connected to SR-IOV nics - Traffic from these VMs by
passes the kernel stack and local ovn-controller do not
bind these ports and cannot serve the native services.
• When CMS supports provisioning baremetal servers.
OVN will provide the native services if CMS has done the below configu‐
ration in the OVN Northbound Database.
• A row is created in Logical_Switch_Port, configuring the
addresses column and setting the type to external.
• ha_chassis_group column is configured.
• The HA chassis which belongs to the HA chassis group has
the ovn-bridge-mappings configured and has proper L2 con‐
nectivity so that it can receive the DHCP and other re‐
lated request packets from these external resources.
• The Logical_Switch of this port has a localnet port.
• Native OVN services are enabled by configuring the DHCP
and other options like the way it is done for the normal
logical ports.
It is recommended to use the same HA chassis group for all the external
ports of a logical switch. Otherwise, the physical switch might see MAC
flap issue when different chassis provide the native services. For ex‐
ample when supporting native DHCPv4 service, DHCPv4 server mac (config‐
ured in options:server_mac column in table DHCP_Options) originating
from different ports can cause MAC flap issue. The MAC of the logical
router IP(s) can also flap if the same HA chassis group is not set for
all the external ports of a logical switch.
SECURITY
Role-Based Access Controls for the Southbound DB
In order to provide additional security against the possibility of an
OVN chassis becoming compromised in such a way as to allow rogue soft‐
ware to make arbitrary modifications to the southbound database state
and thus disrupt the OVN network, role-based access controls (see
ovsdb-server(1) for additional details) are provided for the southbound
database.
The implementation of role-based access controls (RBAC) requires the
addition of two tables to an OVSDB schema: the RBAC_Role table, which
is indexed by role name and maps the the names of the various tables
that may be modifiable for a given role to individual rows in a permis‐
sions table containing detailed permission information for that role,
and the permission table itself which consists of rows containing the
following information:
Table Name
The name of the associated table. This column exists pri‐
marily as an aid for humans reading the contents of this
table.
Auth Criteria
A set of strings containing the names of columns (or col‐
umn:key pairs for columns containing string:string maps).
The contents of at least one of the columns or column:key
values in a row to be modified, inserted, or deleted must
be equal to the ID of the client attempting to act on the
row in order for the authorization check to pass. If the
authorization criteria is empty, authorization checking
is disabled and all clients for the role will be treated
as authorized.
Insert/Delete
Row insertion/deletion permission; boolean value indicat‐
ing whether insertion and deletion of rows is allowed for
the associated table. If true, insertion and deletion of
rows is allowed for authorized clients.
Updatable Columns
A set of strings containing the names of columns or col‐
umn:key pairs that may be updated or mutated by autho‐
rized clients. Modifications to columns within a row are
only permitted when the authorization check for the
client passes and all columns to be modified are included
in this set of modifiable columns.
RBAC configuration for the OVN southbound database is maintained by
ovn-northd. With RBAC enabled, modifications are only permitted for the
Chassis, Encap, Port_Binding, and MAC_Binding tables, and are re‐
stricted as follows:
Chassis
Authorization: client ID must match the chassis name.
Insert/Delete: authorized row insertion and deletion are
permitted.
Update: The columns nb_cfg, external_ids, encaps, and
vtep_logical_switches may be modified when authorized.
Encap Authorization: client ID must match the chassis name.
Insert/Delete: row insertion and row deletion are permit‐
ted.
Update: The columns type, options, and ip can be modi‐
fied.
Port_Binding
Authorization: disabled (all clients are considered au‐
thorized. A future enhancement may add columns (or keys
to external_ids) in order to control which chassis are
allowed to bind each port.
Insert/Delete: row insertion/deletion are not permitted
(ovn-northd maintains rows in this table.
Update: Only modifications to the chassis column are per‐
mitted.
MAC_Binding
Authorization: disabled (all clients are considered to be
authorized).
Insert/Delete: row insertion/deletion are permitted.
Update: The columns logical_port, ip, mac, and datapath
may be modified by ovn-controller.
IGMP_Group
Authorization: disabled (all clients are considered to be
authorized).
Insert/Delete: row insertion/deletion are permitted.
Update: The columns address, chassis, datapath, and ports
may be modified by ovn-controller.
Enabling RBAC for ovn-controller connections to the southbound database
requires the following steps:
1. Creating SSL certificates for each chassis with the certifi‐
cate CN field set to the chassis name (e.g. for a chassis
with external-ids:system-id=chassis-1, via the command
"ovs-pki -u req+sign chassis-1 switch").
2. Configuring each ovn-controller to use SSL when connecting
to the southbound database (e.g. via "ovs-vsctl set open .
external-ids:ovn-remote=ssl:x.x.x.x:6642").
3. Configuring a southbound database SSL remote with "ovn-con‐
troller" role (e.g. via "ovn-sbctl set-connection
role=ovn-controller pssl:6642").
Encrypt Tunnel Traffic with IPsec
OVN tunnel traffic goes through physical routers and switches. These
physical devices could be untrusted (devices in public network) or
might be compromised. Enabling encryption to the tunnel traffic can
prevent the traffic data from being monitored and manipulated.
The tunnel traffic is encrypted with IPsec. The CMS sets the ipsec col‐
umn in the northbound NB_Global table to enable or disable IPsec encry‐
tion. If ipsec is true, all OVN tunnels will be encrypted. If ipsec is
false, no OVN tunnels will be encrypted.
When CMS updates the ipsec column in the northbound NB_Global table,
ovn-northd copies the value to the ipsec column in the southbound
SB_Global table. ovn-controller in each chassis monitors the southbound
database and sets the options of the OVS tunnel interface accordingly.
OVS tunnel interface options are monitored by the ovs-monitor-ipsec
daemon which configures IKE daemon to set up IPsec connections.
Chassis authenticates each other by using certificate. The authentica‐
tion succeeds if the other end in tunnel presents a certificate signed
by a trusted CA and the common name (CN) matches the expected chassis
name. The SSL certificates used in role-based access controls (RBAC)
can be used in IPsec. Or use ovs-pki to create different certificates.
The certificate is required to be x.509 version 3, and with CN field
and subjectAltName field being set to the chassis name.
The CA certificate, chassis certificate and private key are required to
be installed in each chassis before enabling IPsec. Please see
ovs-vswitchd.conf.db(5) for setting up CA based IPsec authentication.
DESIGN DECISIONS
Tunnel Encapsulations
In general, OVN annotates logical network packets that it sends from
one hypervisor to another with the following three pieces of metadata,
which are encoded in an encapsulation-specific fashion:
• 24-bit logical datapath identifier, from the tunnel_key
column in the OVN Southbound Datapath_Binding table.
• 15-bit logical ingress port identifier. ID 0 is reserved
for internal use within OVN. IDs 1 through 32767, inclu‐
sive, may be assigned to logical ports (see the tun‐‐
nel_key column in the OVN Southbound Port_Binding table).
• 16-bit logical egress port identifier. IDs 0 through
32767 have the same meaning as for logical ingress ports.
IDs 32768 through 65535, inclusive, may be assigned to
logical multicast groups (see the tunnel_key column in
the OVN Southbound Multicast_Group table).
When VXLAN is enabled on any hypervisor in a cluster, datapath and
egress port identifier ranges are reduced to 12-bits. This is done be‐
cause only STT and Geneve provide the large space for metadata (over 32
bits per packet). To accommodate for VXLAN, 24 bits available are split
as follows:
• 12-bit logical datapath identifier, derived from the tun‐‐
nel_key column in the OVN Southbound Datapath_Binding ta‐
ble.
• 12-bit logical egress port identifier. IDs 0 through 2047
are used for unicast output ports. IDs 2048 through 4095,
inclusive, may be assigned to logical multicast groups
(see the tunnel_key column in the OVN Southbound Multi‐‐
cast_Group table). For multicast group tunnel keys, a
special mapping scheme is used to internally transform
from internal OVN 16-bit keys to 12-bit values before
sending packets through a VXLAN tunnel, and back from
12-bit tunnel keys to 16-bit values when receiving pack‐
ets from a VXLAN tunnel.
• No logical ingress port identifier.
The limited space available for metadata when VXLAN tunnels are enabled
in a cluster put the following functional limitations onto features
available to users:
• The maximum number of networks is reduced to 4096.
• The maximum number of ports per network is reduced to
2048.
• ACLs matching against logical ingress port identifiers
are not supported.
• OVN interconnection feature is not supported.
In addition to functional limitations described above, the following
should be considered before enabling it in your cluster:
• STT and Geneve use randomized UDP or TCP source ports
that allows efficient distribution among multiple paths
in environments that use ECMP in their underlay.
• NICs are available to offload STT and Geneve encapsula‐
tion and decapsulation.
Due to its flexibility, the preferred encapsulation between hypervisors
is Geneve. For Geneve encapsulation, OVN transmits the logical datapath
identifier in the Geneve VNI. OVN transmits the logical ingress and
logical egress ports in a TLV with class 0x0102, type 0x80, and a
32-bit value encoded as follows, from MSB to LSB:
1 15 16
+---+------------+-----------+
|rsv|ingress port|egress port|
+---+------------+-----------+
0
Environments whose NICs lack Geneve offload may prefer STT encapsula‐
tion for performance reasons. For STT encapsulation, OVN encodes all
three pieces of logical metadata in the STT 64-bit tunnel ID as fol‐
lows, from MSB to LSB:
9 15 16 24
+--------+------------+-----------+--------+
|reserved|ingress port|egress port|datapath|
+--------+------------+-----------+--------+
0
For connecting to gateways, in addition to Geneve and STT, OVN supports
VXLAN, because only VXLAN support is common on top-of-rack (ToR)
switches. Currently, gateways have a feature set that matches the capa‐
bilities as defined by the VTEP schema, so fewer bits of metadata are
necessary. In the future, gateways that do not support encapsulations
with large amounts of metadata may continue to have a reduced feature
set.
OVN 22.03.8 OVN Architecture ovn-architecture(7)