CloudStack Advanced Network Tutorial - Step by Step

This guide is geared more towards CS 4.0 (build 140) and vSphere5, however, the same concept should apply to other hypervisors types like KVM and XEN. This is NOT a beginners guide, please use your judgement and substitute values as necessary.

Disclaimer

The CS4.0 build 140 is defined on purpose in this document - there are known UI issues that have been already addressed - however, since no update/patch has been officially released to address these issues (at the time of this writing)  - in order to configure Advanced Networking - we must use API calls to substitute what GUI could not accomplish. The newer releases may address the UI limitations and API calls may not be necessary. Nevertheless, its a good learning experience.

What This Guide Covers

• CloudStack Advanced Network Concepts
• Physical Networks and Mapping
• VLAN Tagging
• Usage of Virtual Switches
• Network Offerings
• API Usage and CloudMokey CLI
• Troubleshooting 

Assumptions

• Used CloudStack previously and have basic network setup functional
• Able to provision VMs in basic network setup and your setup is fully operational
• Have understanding of basic terminology - go to this page for CS4 Documentation
• Root access to your hypervisors/virtual center and know your network topology
• Minimal experience with using APIs and/or CloudMonkey CLI
• Able to tell what config options must change to suit your environment

Getting Started

If you attempted to create Advanced Networking - but for some reason it did not work and you would like to start over

• If you've tried previously to configure CS within your environment and it has not worked, before you begin, make sure you environment is clean from all previous attempts. I will use VSphere 5 as an example, translate it to a hypervisor of your choice.
• Remove all network modifications on your Hypervisors/Cluster created by CS
• Remove all storage modifications on your Hypervisors/Cluster created by CS
• Remove all the content from NFS primary and secondary datastore (i'm making assumption that data is not needed) or present a new primary and secondary NFS datastore
• Remove all the references from CS about the zone/pod/cluster/storage/networks/hosts you attempted to add but failed
  If there are remnants of previous setup - there is a chance your Zone Deployment may fail - therefore, please confirm that your environment is in pristine state as it was pre-CloudStack Zone Deployment operation

Pretext

The example environment in this tutorial consists of:

Physical gear and OS:

• 3 x HP BL465 G8 Servers as hypervisors
• Each hypervisor has 6 NICs
• VmWare vSphere 5.0 u1 and Virtual Center 5.0

Hypervisor Network Layout -  same on all 3 hosts:

--------------------------------------------------------------

• vSwitch0 - Virtual Switch for Management - 2 Physical NICs assigned 
  • Management Network - Portgroup for Management vnic vmk0
    • NO VLAN TAGGING

• vSwitch1 - Virtual Switch for vMotion Network - 2 Physical NICs assigned
  • vMotion - PortGroup for vMotion operations
    • NO VLAN TAGGING

• vSwitch2 - Virtual Switch for Guest VMs TRUNK Network - 2 Physical NICs assigned
  • MGMT - PortGroup for VMs on Management Network
    • VLAN TAG/ID 1045
  • DEV - PortGroup for VMs on Development Network
    • VLAN TAG/ID 1075

Step 1: Import system template

SSH to your CS4 environment

Mount the secondary NFS storage to /mnt/secondary on CS4

Run

/usr/lib64/cloud/common/scripts/storage/secondary/cloud-install-sys-tmplt -m /mnt/secondary/ -u http://download.cloud.com/templates/burbank/burbank-systemvm-08012012.ova -h vmware

Step 2: Create a network layout sheet for your reference

It is recommended to create layout of how you believe CloudStack IP allocation will take place, hence a quick write up of what networks get what assignments is very helpful.

In this example, we have a 3 node VmWare vSphere 5 cluster

To be continued