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Tag: SDN

1Oct

BGP as a Service (BGPaaS) Between Contrail, vSRX and Quagga

In the previous post, we discussed how to deploy vSRX on Openstack. Since I’m using Contrail as my SDN for this setup, this one will be about setting up BGP as a Service (BGPaaS) between Contrail, vSRX, and Quagga.

The scenario I’m trying to demonstrate is the following:

vSRX to advertise the pool 90.90.90.0/29
Quagga to advertise the pool 80.80.80.0/29
Both pools should exchanged between the nodes and Contrail using BGPaaS.

Contrail Configuration:

vSRX and Quagga VMs are attached to ports on ZoneA_MGMT Virtual Network (172.90.90.0/24), as follows

Virtual Network Gateway: 172.90.90.1 [AS64512]
vSRX: 172.90.90.10 [AS35500]
Quagga: 172.90.90.20 [AS42750]

We will setup two BGP as a Service objects in Contrail under Configure > Services > BGP as a Service, like this:

28Mar

Resolving config_database_cassandra Container Restart Loop

Posted by: Ameen in SDN Leave a comment

A not-so-fun error occurred earlier today when my standalone Contrail/Tungsten Fabric Controller host went down. After bringing it back up, Cassandra DB was reporting the following errors:

Standalone Controller is not a recommended design, due to the nature of components running in it, plus how vRouter connects with controllers. This post is discussing a PoC setup.

Using the command contrail-status to display all services on that node (output will be different on vRouter nodes):

== Contrail control ==
control: initializing (Database:Cassandra connection down)
nodemgr: initializing

== Contrail config-database ==
nodemgr: initializing (Cassandra state detected DOWN. )

== Contrail database ==
nodemgr: initializing

== Contrail analytics ==
snmp-collector: initializing (Database:Cassandra[] connection down)
query-engine: initializing
alarm-gen: initializing (Database:Cassandra[] connection down)
nodemgr: initializing
collector: initializing (Database:Cassandra, Database:contrail-01.ameen.lab:Global connection down)
topology: initializing (Database:Cassandra[] connection down)

== Contrail webui ==

== Contrail config ==
svc-monitor: initializing (Database:Cassandra[] connection down)
nodemgr: initializing
device-manager: initializing (ApiServer:ApiServer[] connection down)
api: initializing (Database:Cassandra[] connection down)
schema: initializing (ApiServer:ApiServer[] connection down)

Also, some services were reporting state UP for less than 2 minutes, while the controller node itself was up for almost an hour:

Pod              Service         Original Name                          State    Status      
config-database  cassandra       contrail-external-cassandra            running  Up 11 seconds  
database         cassandra       contrail-external-cassandra            running  Up About a minute  
control          nodemgr         contrail-nodemgr                       running  Up About a minute 
config-database  nodemgr         contrail-nodemgr                       running  Up 34 seconds

Checking on the Cassandra container revealed the issue: Read More »

18Mar

Generate Link-Local Mapping for VMs on Tungsten Fabric

Posted by: Ameen in SDN 2 Comments

Lately, I’ve been fiddling around with Juniper Contrail (Available as Upstream project: Tungsten Fabric). So, I’ll be posting about different stuff I learn about it, SDN in general, and Openstack as well.

One thing that I find myself doing often is testing connectivity between different network resources, primarily VMs. To do so, sometimes I need to test end-to-end connectivity which requires accessing the VM and initiating something as simple as a ping command to see what happens.

However, VNC Console (Or direct connectivity from my workstation towards Overlay/Virtual Networks that virtual machines are connected to may not be available. For this, I need to connect to the VM using the link-local IP address directly from the vRouter / Compute node.

I wrote a python script that uses Contrail API Introspect service to fetch info about compute nodes, then prints the info for VMs hosted on each one of them. In this example, I need to access a VM called AAP_02, so I use the script to find on which vRouter / Compute node it is hosted, then access it directly from there without needing to source Openstack credentials: