Introduction

In the previous chapter, we saw how OpenStack supports Open vSwitch as the mechanism for a VLAN network type. Similar to Open vSwitch, Linux bridge is a software bridge in a Linux host that is capable of providing virtual network connectivity to instances.

In this chapter, we will see how to implement a network type called Flat Network. We will also see how to provide an external (say, the Internet) access to virtual machines (VMs).

Finally, we will apply the concepts learned in this chapter to deploy a simple web application.

In order to implement these recipes, you will need an OpenStack setup as described here:

This setup has one compute node and one node for controller and networking services. For this chapter, you can also have a single all-in-one environment.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the core functionality of Neutron is to provide a Layer 2 (L2) connectivity. Neutron provides this functionality through the use of a core plugin. All the recipes of this chapter assume that ML2 is the core plugin in the Neutron configuration file.