Friday, November 15, 2019

OpenContrail - Part 1

When I came to this shop and found out that they were running OpenStack but were not running Neutron, I about panicked. Especially when I found out they were running OpenContrail.

OpenContrail uses BGP and XMPP as its control plane protocols and route advertisements/exchanges. And it uses MPLS over GRE/UDP to direct packets. The documentation says it CAN use VXLAN - which Neutron also seems to favor (over GRE tunneling). But here at least, it is being run in the way the designed of OpenContrail wanted it to run - which is as an MPLS L3VPN.

I am going to drop some links in here real quick and come back and flush this blog entry out.

Here is an Architectural Guide on OpenContrail. Make sure you have time to digest this.

https://www.juniper.net/us/en/local/pdf/whitepapers/2000535-en.pdf

Once you read the architecture, here is a Gitbook on OpenContrail that can be used to get more familiarity.

https://sureshkvl.gitbooks.io/opencontrail-beginners-tutorial/content/

Perhaps the stash of gold was the location of a 2013 video from one of the developers of vRouter itself. It turns out most of the stuff in this video is still relevant for OpenContrail several years later. I could not find these slides anywhere, so I did make my own slide deck that highlights important discussions that took place on this video, as well as some of the key concepts shown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhn7AYvv2Yg

If you read these, you are halfway there. Maybe more than halfway actually.

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