OVN via OVSDBApp

Configuring OVN natively using a python library

I recently came across a nice bash script written by Russell that creates logical switches, a logical router, and ACLs in OVN. It also tests that config using bound OVS ports from namespaces. In the real world, a CMS (like Openstack) uses a python library, called ovsdbapp, to establish a session and talk natively with the OVN database. I rewrote part of Russell’s script to give you an idea of how that gets done. So, if you find yourself using the ovn-nbctl and ovn-sbctl commands a lot, read on to learn more about a nice way of working with OVN.

Parallel to that, I also wanted to see how fast I could get a VM running OVN from scratch. I was happy to see that this can be accomplished in a little over 1 minute! For that, I leveraged Vagrant with the centos 8 box and the packages built in RDO. If you need more info on having Vagrant with libvirt, take a look at this other blog that I wrote.

To get started, install Vagrant and bring up the VM using the following repo:

$ git clone -b blog \
  https://github.com/flavio-fernandes/ovsdbapp_playground.git && \
  cd ovsdbapp_playground && \
  time vagrant up

Looking at the Vagrantfile, you can see how the VM provisioning adds RDO as the repository where the OVS+OVN packages are located. Once up, ssh into the VM and run this script to quickly ensure that the provisioning went well:

$ vagrant ssh

(.env) [vagrant@localhost ~]$ ./scripts/steps.sh

It all happens quickly, but here are the main pieces that get exercised via steps.sh:

  1. create OVS ports inside namespaces
  2. configure OVN with logical switches, ports, router and ACLs
  3. test the connectivity based on ACLs and ports bound at namespace
  4. undo config and creation of namespaces

Note that each step is actually a separate file that you can explicitly run. Use that to take yourself to the point that interests you and poke around.

There are lots of interesting things to cover here, but I’m focusing on what happens in step 2 above. That is where ovsdbapp comes into the picture. Using that, native OVSDB RPCs populate OVN’s northbound tables. ovsdbapp is installed via pip during the provisioning. That is a self-contained library that can be cloned via Github (or Gerrit):

While ovsdbapp is generic enough to be used with any OVSDB schema, many helpers exist to make life easy in dealing with the OVN Northbound DB. There is also an API for OVN Southbound and open_vswitch.

$ pip install ovsdbapp

Once ovsdbapp is installed, the first thing we need to do is to connect it to the right OVSDB server. In this case, that is the OVN Northbound. These servers can be configured to connect in several ways, including SSL, TCP or Unix sockets. With the command below, we can make it listen on TCP port 6641 on the loopback address:

$ sudo ovn-nbctl set-connection ptcp:6641:127.0.0.1

Let’s jump into interactive python and connect to OVN’s NB:

Python

from ovsdbapp.backend.ovs_idl import connection
from ovsdbapp.schema.ovn_northbound import impl_idl

conn = "tcp:127.0.0.1:6641"

# The python-ovs Idl class. Take it from server's database
i = connection.OvsdbIdl.from_server(conn, 'OVN_Northbound')

# The ovsdbapp Connection object
c = connection.Connection(idl=i, timeout=3)

# The OVN_Northbound API implementation object
api = impl_idl.OvnNbApiIdlImpl(c)

At this point, we have a working API to a running OVN Norhbound database! Let’s create the most common component OVN uses (a logical switch):

api.ls_add("sw0").execute()

With OVSDB, many changes can be grouped into a single transaction. To give you an idea of how that can be accomplished using ovsdbapp, take a look at this example:

# Create a transaction and add a logical switch with 2 ports
with api.transaction(check_error=True) as txn:
    txn.add(api.ls_add("sw1"))
    txn.add(api.lsp_add("sw1", "sw1-port1"))
    txn.add(api.lsp_set_addresses("sw1-port1", ["50:54:00:00:00:01 11.0.0.1"]))
    txn.add(api.lsp_add("sw1", "sw1-port2"))
    txn.add(api.lsp_set_addresses("sw1-port2", ["50:54:00:00:00:02 11.0.0.2"]))

Tables can be iterated with some simple commands. For instance:

for ls_row in api.ls_list().execute(check_error=True):
    print("uuid: %s, name: %s" % (ls_row.uuid, ls_row.name))
    for lsp_row in api.lsp_list(switch=ls_row.uuid).execute():
        print("  uuid: %s, name: %s" % (lsp_row.uuid, lsp_row.name))

Look at lines 59 to 75 of step2 script to see a transaction that creates a virtual logical router and its ports. That file also creates ACLs, which is an OVN feature flexible enough to handle all that Openstack security groups need and more.

Lastly, here is a recording that shows an interactive python session using ovsdbapp. It uses the commands mentioned above, so you can have an idea of what these return: asciicast

All in all, I hope that this page helps as an intro on ovsdbapp and how it can be used for handling OVN. There are tons more that this module can do and that is not related to OVN. So do not stop here! Many thanks to Terry Wilson for writing this neat library and help me learn it.

Also see: