9. Contrail TSN (experimental)

9.1. TSN Description

Contrail supports extending a cluster to include bare metal servers and other virtual instances connected to a TOR switch supporting OVSDB protocol. You can configure the bare metal servers and other virtual instances to be a part of any of the virtual networks configured in the contrail cluster facilitating communication between them and the virtual instances running in the cluster. You can use Contrail policy configurations to control this communication.

The solution uses the OVSDB protocol to configure the TOR switch and to import dynamically learnt addresses from it. VXLAN encapsulation will be used in the data plane communication with the TOR switch.

A new node, the TOR services node (TSN), is introduced and provisioned as a new role in the Contrail system. The TSN acts as the multicast controller for the TOR switches. TSN also provides DHCP and DNS services to the bare metal servers or virtual instances running behind TOR ports.

TSN receives all the broadcast packets from the TOR, and replicates them to the required compute nodes in the cluster and to other EVPN nodes. Broadcast packets from the virtual machines in the cluster are sent directly from the respective compute nodes to the TOR switch.

TSN can also act as the DHCP server for the bare metal servers or virtual instances, leasing IP addresses to them, along with other DHCP options configured in the system. TSN also provides a DNS service for the bare metal servers.

See also

Contrail Wiki

9.2. Prerequisites

This guide assumes that you have installed Fuel and all the nodes of your future environment are discovered and functional. To configure TSN in you environment, you need to perform steps additional to Installation Guide

To configure TSN in your network, you need TOR switch.

9.3. Configure TSN

  1. Enable ToR Agents

    _images/tsn_settings.png

  2. Enable tor agent SSL certifications creation (optional)

  3. Provide Tor Agents configuration in YAML format, based on example

    01:
  ovs_port: 6286
  ovs_protocol: tcp
  tor_mgmt_ip: 10.109.4.150
  tor_tun_ip: 10.109.4.150
  tor_device_name: ovs1
  tor_vendor_name: ovs
02:
  ovs_port: 6286
  ovs_protocol: pssl
  tor_mgmt_ip: 10.109.4.151
  tor_tun_ip: 10.109.4.151
  tor_device_name: ovs2
  tor_vendor_name: ovs

  4. Verify working TSN by going to Contrail web UI