Chapter 2. Planning your OVN deployment

The ovn-controller service runs on each Compute node and connects to the OVN SB database server to retrieve the logical flows. The ovn-controller translates these logical flows into physical OpenFlow flows and adds the flows to the OVS bridge (br-int). To communicate with ovs-vswitchd and install the OpenFlow flows, the ovn-controller connects to the local ovsdb-server (that hosts conf.db) using the UNIX socket path that was passed when ovn-controller was started (for example unix:/var/run/openvswitch/db.sock).

The ovn-controller service expects certain key-value pairs in the external_ids column of the Open_vSwitch table; puppet-ovn uses puppet-vswitch to populate these fields. Below are the key-value pairs that puppet-vswitch configures in the external_ids column:

hostname=<HOST NAME>
ovn-encap-ip=<IP OF THE NODE>
ovn-encap-type=geneve
ovn-remote=tcp:OVN_DBS_VIP:6642

The director has a composable service for OVN named ovn-dbs with two profiles: the base profile and the pacemaker HA profile. The OVN northbound and southbound databases are hosted by the ovsdb-server service. Similarly, the ovsdb-server process runs alongside ovs-vswitchd to host the OVS database (conf.db).

In addition to the required HA profile, Red Hat recommends that you deploy OVN with DVR to ensure the availability of networking services. With the HA profile enabled, the OVN database servers start on all the Controllers, and pacemaker then selects one controller to serve in the master role.

The ovsdb-server service does not currently support active-active mode. It does support HA with the master-slave mode, which is managed by Pacemaker using the resource agent Open Cluster Framework (OCF) script. Having ovsdb-server run in master mode allows write access to the database, while all the other slave ovsdb-server services replicate the database locally from the master, and do not allow write access.

The YAML file for this profile is the tripleo-heat-templates/environments/services/neutron-ovn-dvr-ha.yaml file. When enabled, the OVN database servers are managed by Pacemaker, and puppet-tripleo creates a pacemaker OCF resource named ovn:ovndb-servers.

The OVN database servers are started on each Controller node, and the controller owning the virtual IP address (OVN_DBS_VIP) runs the OVN DB servers in master mode. The OVN ML2 mechanism driver and ovn-controller then connect to the database servers using the OVN_DBS_VIP value. In the event of a failover, Pacemaker moves the virtual IP address (OVN_DBS_VIP) to another controller, and also promotes the OVN database server running on that node to master.

OVN supports Layer 3 high availability (L3 HA) without any special configuration. OVN automatically schedules the router port to all available gateway nodes that can act as an L3 gateway on the specified external network. OVN L3 HA uses the gateway_chassis column in the OVN Logical_Router_Port table. Most functionality is managed by OpenFlow rules with bundled active_passive outputs. The ovn-controller handles the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) responder and router enablement and disablement. Gratuitous ARPs for FIPs and router external addresses are also periodically sent by the ovn-controller.

Each gateway node monitors all the other gateway nodes in a star topology in the deployment. Gateway nodes also monitor the compute nodes to let the gateways enable and disable routing of packets and ARP responses and announcements.

Each compute node uses BFD to monitor each gateway node and automatically steers external traffic, such as source and destination Network Address Translation (SNAT and DNAT), through the active gateway node for a given router. Compute nodes do not need to monitor other compute nodes.

L3 HA for OVN supports the following failure modes: