Chapter 4. Building a Virtual Switching Infrastructure

One of the core functions of OpenStack Networking is to provide connectivity to and from instances by programmatically configuring the network infrastructure of the cloud.

In the last chapter, we installed various Neutron services and the ML2 plugin across all nodes in the cloud. In this chapter, you will be introduced to networking concepts and architectures that Neutron relies on to provide connectivity to instances as well as multiple mechanism drivers that extend the functionality of the ML2 network plugin: the LinuxBridge, Open vSwitch, and L2 population drivers. You will be guided through the installation and configuration of the drivers and their respective agents, and we will lay a foundation for the creation of networks and instances in the chapters to come.