OpenVSwitch on OpenStack: Round II

Originally, I had attempted to get OpenVSwitch working on OpenStack and had to back that effort out. This was because I had some proof of concepts to deliver and didn't have the time to spend learning and debugging OpenVSwitch.

I circled back on OpenVSwitch and reconfigured my OpenStack network to use OpenVSwitch. This entailed recfonfiguration of Neutron on both the OpenStack Controller / Network node (my system has these combined into a single VM), and the respective OpenStack Compute Nodes.

The main issue I was having (and still have) is that when  Controller node reboots, it pulls an address on the physical NIC eth0. On OpenVswitch, when a physical node is attached as a port to a bridge, the IP Address needs to be set to the bridge, and cannot be on the physical NIC.

So what I am having to do right now, is flush the eth0 interface with:
ip a flush dev eth0

This removes all IP settings on eth0. Then I have to manually add the IP information onto the bridge (br-provider) using iproute.

Now this alone does not get things working. There are still a couple more things you have to do.

First, you have to explicitly set the link up on the openvswitch br-provider bridge in order to get packets to flow properly:
# ip l set br-provider up

Then, restarting the (properly configured) service neutron-openvswitch-agent should result in all of the bridge tap interfaces disappearing from the general network namespace of the host and reappearing on the openvswitch namespace, such that when you run ovs-vsctl show, they show up there instead of on the os command line by running "ip a".

But it appears this was the main culprit and everything seems to be working fine now with openvswitch.