Open Stack

Hi,

I have been trying to get networking working in a 'simple' internal
cloud for a couple of months now and I am beginning to give up.

This internal cloud would be used for software testing distributed
systems. There are no external users, no multi tenancy.

Basically I have 4 spare mounted machines, nothing special.

* Two that don't support hardware virtualisation. These would make
good controllers / LXC compute nodes.
* Two that do support hardware virtualisation. So I was planning to
use KVM here.
* One managed 1Gbps switch (although I've not made use of the managed
features yet)
* One unmanaged 100Mbs switch (I almost want to throw this way)
* Each machine has two network ports, one internal and one external.
* I don't have control over the gateway router in the external LAN
that the machines are connected to

Basically what I'd like to do is have a multi (compute) host cloud
that supports VMs with two interfaces, one public interface with a
routable ip (on the private LAN, but outside the cloud) and one
private (only routable within the cloud). The attractive thing about
this setup is from the point of the view of the software running in
the cloud it mimics the basic setup in public clouds. So if we needed
to scale up we could point our scripts to a different cloud and still
take advantage of low traffic costs on their 'internal' networks.

Its the networking that is the major problem for me. Not really
knowing what networking daemon was necessary, I started out with
nova-network. This almost worked but it was hard to support two guest
networks. It might have worked if it were possible to run two dhcp
servers on one bridge (a limitation of nova-network daemon caused the
second dhcp server to overwrite the config of the first!). Another way
it might have worked would have been if linux bridge let you connect a
real port to two bridges or bridges to one another, but it doesn't.

So then I tried neutron but the guides that I found were vague and had
surprising hardware requirements, like

* Need a managed switch (in addition to OVS!)
* Need an external router (disappointing given that nova network had a
software router on each compute node!)

These requirements seemed to be because of the extra security needed
for multi-tenancy that were not relevant to my use case. But after
having tried many different permutations of settings in neutron I
can't see a way forward.

Is what I am doing impossible?

Frank