In my last post we covered the all-in-one installation of the OpenStack controller with the Nutanix shipped Acropolis Openstack drivers. The install created a single virtual machine, the Openstack Services VM (OVM). In this post I intend to talk about setting up a Network Topology using the Openstack dashboard and the Neutron service integration with Nutanix. I will be able to show how this gets reflected in the Acropolis Prism GUI. First, let’s create a public network for our VMs to reside on. Navigate via the Horizon dashboard to Admin > Networks…
Create Network
Currently, only local and VLAN “Provider Network Types” are supported by the Nutanix Openstack drivers. In the screenshot below, I am creating a segmented network (ID 64), named public-network, in the default admin tenant. I specify the network as shared and external.
Pro Tip
Do not use a VLAN/network assignment that has already been defined within the Nutanix cluster. Any network/subnet assignment should be done within Openstack using network parameters reserved specifically for your Openstack deployments.
Create Subnet
Each network needs to have a subnet created with an associated DHCP pool. This DHCP pool information gets sent via the appropriate API call to Acropolis. Acropolis management associates the IP address with the vnic on the Acropolis VM. The Acropolis Openstack driver reads this configuration and, when the cloud instance gets powered on in Openstack, it will register the IP address with the Openstack VM. See setup screenshots below…
Pro Tip
When creating a subnet, you must specify a DNS server.

3. Subnet creation – requires subnet name, network address (CIDR notation), gateway address, DHCP pool range, DNS servers
We can see the newly created network reflected in Acropolis via the Prism GUI in the screenshot below:
Pro Tip
Once a network has been configured and you decide to add an additional cluster. That network will not be extended across the new cluster. You have a choice, you can either add a new network. Or, you can remove the network and re-add it so that it gets created across all the currently configured clusters.
Now that we have a network configured we can look at setting up cloud instances to run on it. To do that we need to set up the Glance Image Service and that’s the subject of my next post.
Additional reading
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-openstack-neutron/
http://docs.openstack.org/kilo/install-guide/install/apt/content/neutron-concepts.html