Robin Jarry’s Blog

This document covers the OpenShift installation process for bare metal and virtual machines using the agent-based installer and the appliance builder, targeting OpenShift 4.18 through 4.20. 1. OpenShift Appliance Image Provisioning 1.1 Overview The openshift-appliance utility builds a self-contained disk image that orchestrates OpenShift installation using the agent-based installer. Its primary use case is fully disconnected (air-gapped) installations where no internet connectivity or external container registries are available. All required container images (the OCP release payload, operators, additional images) are embedded directly in the disk image. The resulting image is generic: the same image can deploy multiple different OpenShift clusters. Cluster-specific configuration is provided separately via a config-image ISO at deployment time. ...

Summary grout stands for Graph Router. It is a DPDK based network processing application. It uses the rte_graph library for data path processing. grout comes with a message based API to configure it over a standard UNIX socket and a CLI that uses that API. The CLI can be used as an interactive shell, but also in scripts one command at a time, or by batches. Its main purpose is to simulate a network function or a physical router for testing/replicating real (usually closed source) VNF/CNF behavior with an opensource tool. ...

This is a collection of tips about Python development that I have gathered over the years and put up together. Some of this content may be a bit outdated but can still apply today. Language Basics Introduction Documentation The Python language has a VERY extensive official documentation (written in reStructuredText). Most of the following information in this presentation comes from it. When not sure about something, look here first: ...

This is my internal ramblings that occurred while learning how to deploy a Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17.0 cluster for NFV integration testing. Big picture Here is what I will be working with: 1G access to an external/management network. 10G top of rack switch. 3 Dell r640 servers (labelled as hypervisor, compute1 and compute2). Each server with an Intel X710 4x10G NIC. First port is connected to the 1G management network. The BMCs of compute1 and compute2 are connected to that network. The other three ports are connected to a private 10G switch. Each port is configured as trunk with VLANs 400-409. Ports eno2 are configured with a native VLAN 400 as well. These ports will be used for the control plane network (PXE boot provisioning, openstack services internal traffic, etc.) Physical topology This represents the physical layout of machines and switches. ...

In this technical write up, I explain how I came up with a method to benchmark the Open vSwitch (OvS) userspace datapath connection tracking performance and how this was used to characterize this recent patch series included in OvS 3.0.0 which aims at improving the multi-thread scalability. What Is Connection Tracking? Connection tracking (conntrack) is the process of keeping track of logical network connections (also named flows) and thereby identifying all packets that make up each flow so that they can be handled consistently together. ...