Openstack is a private cloud solution that enables centralized management of large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter. Being open source and highly modular, Openstack gives you a platform to build your own vendor-agnostic datacenter.
Why should you use the Infoblox IPAM driver?
In an Openstack environment, you can leverage the Cloud Network Automation(CNA) License and the Infoblox IPAM Driver Plugin(found here).
- Centralized view: Infoblox provides a centralized and granular view of all IPAM, DNS, and DHCP data across all your environments.
- Cloud Specific data: The Cloud Network Automation license enables a Cloud Tab in the NIOS UI to manage DDI information organized by tenant, network, and virtual machine for Cloud objects.
- Dynamic integration of your Openstack environment: The Infoblox IPAM Driver Plugin enables automatic creation and reclamation of networks, IP addresses, DNS and DHCP records when network objects are created and decommissioned in Openstack.
- Multi-tenancy: In conjunction with Network Views, it supports multi-tenancy
- Auditing: Full visibility into IP Addresses, DNS, and DHCP record creation/deletion for auditing, compliance tracking and reporting.
What happens if you already have a functioning Openstack environment?
Consider having an Openstack enviroment where you have already created multiple projects, networks and instances, as shown below.
You can use migration scripts available with the plugin to import all the network objects into the Infoblox grid.
First, install the plugin in 6 simple steps
The Infoblox driver should be installed on the controller nodes that are running your neutron-server. The installation consists of the following basic steps (refer here for more details)
- Configure Infoblox Grid user
- Install the driver module on the controller nodes
- Run database migrations to create the Infoblox tables
- Modify the neutron and nova configuration files (neutron.conf and nova.conf)
- Start the Infoblox IPAM Agent
- Restart the neutron and nova services (neutron-server nova-compute)
Second, migrate the existing environment in to Infoblox
As part of the installation, three scripts can be found under the tools directory (/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/networking_infoblox/tools) in the distribution.
- create_ea_defs.py
The driver uses a variety of Extensible Attributes (EAs) to manage its configuration. The needed extensible attributes may be created automatically using this script. The script will also prompt you for association or un-association of network views to OpenStack. This is an important step. You can use this script to select network views explicitly to use in OpenStack. - infoblox_grid_sync.py
Synchronizes the Infoblox grid to the Neutron database, and the values of the EAs defined on the grid. - sync_neutron_to_infoblox.py
This migrates the already created networks, subnets and ports in OpenStack to the Infoblox grid,
Before running the migration scripts, note that the creation of the network objects in the Openstack environment is driven by the EAs defined on the Grid, making it highly customizable. For example, setting Default Network View Scope determines the usage of network views. If you set this to Tenant, a new network view is created for every active project in Openstack, hence enabling enables multi-tenancy and overlapping networks. Similarly, DHCP Support and DNS Support determines if the DHCP and DNS support needs to be provided by the Grid, respectively. You can find more information here.
Once you have the EAs configured to your needs, run the migration script.
Once the migration script has finished executing, you can see that a network view gets created for every active tenant in Openstack. Each network view has the corresponding zones, records, and networks automatically created according to the EAs defined. For example, this is how the network objects in the admin project looks.
Adding the CNA license enables a sperate cloud tab that is enriched with cloud specific information, such as tenants, Networks and Virtual Machines as shown below.
To know more about the plugin, you can watch this video.
Takeaways
Migrating your existing Openstack environments is very simple. The Infoblox IPAM driver along with the Cloud Network Automation license provides you a customizable, holistic and granular view of your environment.
Try it now
You may download the Infoblox Cloud Adapter for OpenStack from our downloads page.
