OpenStack Charms 20.10 – Victoria, OVN, CNTT and more

by Tytus Kurek on 4 November 2020

Canonical is proud to announce the availability of OpenStack Charms 20.10. This new release introduces a range of exciting features and several improvements which enhance Charmed OpenStack.

OpenStack Victoria

OpenStack Charms 20.10 brings OpenStack Victoria on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (via Cloud Archive) and Ubuntu 20.10 with full support from Canonical until April 2022. Victoria is the 22nd release of OpenStack which comes with many interesting features of its own, including solutions for complex networking scenarios.

Neutron now provides its metadata service over IPv6 networks which means that users can access it without a configuration drive in IPv6-only networks. Neutron has also added support for flat networks for Distributed Virtual Routers (DVR), Floating IP port forwarding for the OVN backend, and router availability zones in OVN.

Octavia load balancer pools now support version two of the PROXY protocol. This allows one to pass client information to member servers when using TCP protocols. PROXYv2 improves the performance of establishing new connections using the PROXY protocol to member servers, especially when the listener is using IPv6.

In order to upgrade your Charmed OpenStack environment to OpenStack Victoria, refer to the instructions in the official documentation.

For more information about OpenStack Victoria, refer to the official release notes.

OVS to OVN migration

A major enhancement included in the OpenStack Charms 20.10 release is a clear migration path to Open Virtual Network (OVN) for legacy deployments using Open vSwitch (OVS). This allows Charmed OpenStack users to easily migrate from OVS to OVN and benefit from the advantages of OVN, such as native support for virtual network abstraction and better segregation of the control plane and the data plane. As a result, they get a fully functional open source software-defined networking (SDN) platform in their Charmed OpenStack environment.

The entire migration process is fully automated and encapsulated in charms to provide high-level abstraction. Users only have to adjust their maximum transmission unit (MTU) size to allow for Geneve encapsulation used by OVN, deploy OVN components and the Vault service, and initialise the migration. Once the migration is finished users can safely remove redundant components like Neutron OVS agents and Neutron Gateway from the Juju model.

Refer to the official documentation for exact instruction on how to perform the migration. You can also watch a video from the Open Infrastructure Summit 2020 – “Hassle-free migration from OVS to OVN”

CNTT reference implementation

Another notable achievement is the introduction of a Cloud iNfrastructure Telco Task Force (CNTT) reference implementation based on OpenStack Charms. CNTT is a project under the governance of the Linux Foundation aimed at defining a single reference architecture for network function virtualisation infrastructure (NFVI) implementation. This involves open source technologies, such as OpenStack, Ceph and Kubernetes.

During this cycle, Canonical became an active member of the CNTT community and contributed CNTT reference implementation based on OpenStack Charms. This confirms Canonical’s long-term commitment to deliver a carrier-grade private cloud, enabling service providers to reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with telecommunications infrastructure maintenance and accelerate their time to market. You can find all the artifacts, including Juju bundles, in the following repository on GitHub.

Other notable changes in OpenStack Charms 20.10

With each new feature, there is a corresponding example bundle in the form of a test bundle, and or an OpenStack Charms Deployment Guide section which details the use of the feature.

• ceph-iscsi charm graduated to stable – The ceph-iscsi charm, introduced with the OpenStack Charms 20.05 release, is a way of utilising standalone Charmed Ceph clusters by legacy infrastructure through iSCSI protocol, has now been promoted  to a stable state.
• BlueStore compression for Ceph RBD pools – The data residing on the BlueStore-based OSDs can now be compressed on-the-fly for better disk utilisation while ensuring high performance of the storage backend.
• Erasure-coded Ceph pools – Ceph pools can now be configured as erasure-coded which reduces the amount of disk space in a Ceph cluster required to ensure data durability.
• Default volume type for Cinder – The cinder charm now allows specifying the default volume type that will be used when creating Cinder volumes.

Get in touch

If you are interested in OpenStack consulting, support or fully managed solution, get in touch with Canonical!

For more information about OpenStack Charms 20.10, please refer to the official release notes.