Page History

Bug Reference

Wiki MarkupThe Jira issue associated with this design spec is CLOUDSTACK-1043 \ [1\]

Branch

The work is being carried out in branch standalone-nic, staged in a Github repository
https://github.com/siwater/incubator-cloudstack.

Introduction

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This design proposes to expose a virtual network interface card (NIC) as a first class object in the CloudStack API. The pattern follows that of the Amazon Elastic Network Interface \ [2\].

Purpose

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In CloudStack 4.0 release a virtual NIC is implicitly created when a virtual machine is deployed and connected to a network. Subsequent API changes \ [3\] have been made in the 4.1 release to allow a NIC to be added/removed from a virtual machine after creation.

This design document proposes changes which expose a virtual network interface card (NIC) as a standalone entity in the CloudStack API that may be explicitly created/deleted and attached/detached from a virtual machine.

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The required UI components are TBD.

Appendix

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Appendix A: Implementation Phases

The work will be undertaken in two phases:.h5

Phase 1 - Implement NIC as a standalone entity

This phase will implement the majority of the new functionality; adding the capabilities to create and delete NICs, attach and detach them from a virtual machine and provide a query (list) service to enumerate the NICs in the system. It will provide the ability to associate one or more security groups with a NIC (but not make any changes to how security groups are applied to a VM/Nic)

The completion of this phase will have little impact on the rest of the CloudStack system, as the new features will be relatively standalone. The idea is to be able to add the new code to the existing CloudStack codebase with relatively little risk, and be able to standalone test the new features before fully integrating them into the system..h5

Phase 2 - Integrate standalone NIC

This phase will integrate the standalone NIC code with the rest of the system. Any existing APIs will be modified at this stage, and where necessary commands will be merged (e.g. secondary IP address work has also introduced a "list NICs" command and an "update NIC" command which we may wish to combine with the ones produced here.

In addition the work will be carried out to modify the implementation of security groups so that they are applied to a virtual NIC only.

Appendix B: Testing

Unit Tests

Unit tests are provided for the create and delete NIC commands

Integration Tests

A collection of integration tests for the create/delete/list/attach/detach NIC commands are provided in the test/integration/smoke folder (see test_standalone_nic.py).
Testing to date has been limited to the XenServer platform.