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Inter-VPC connectivity made easy in Cosmic 5.3

19 January 2017 — Leave a comment

It’s been one year after Cosmic started, forked off of the Apache CloudStack project. Cosmic 5.3 brings easy-to-use connectivity between VPCs. CloudStack users will recognise the Private Gateway functionality, which has been completely refactored in Cosmic 5.3. This blog shows what’s new.

The goal: connect VMs together that live in different VPCs
Basically, what you want is to setup a bunch of VPCs, create networks inside them where the VMs will live. Once you do that, there is no easy way to connect VMs from one VPC to another. Sure, you could make a VPN connection, and that is preferred in some cases. When you work in the same availability zone, and for example want Management VMs to access Acceptance or Production, there’s an easy alternative to get connectivity.

Create a Private Network
In Cosmic 5.3 you can create a network of type Private. A default network offering for this is created automatically, the only real difference is setting the type to Private (other networks are usually of type Isolated).

create-private-network-filled

Create Private Network

If you want, you can specify a VLAN of LSwitch manually by selecting an offering that supports it. You’d only do that in special cases, as it requires manual setup that is otherwise done automatically for you.

create-private-network-vlan

Create Private Network with a specific VLAN

Connect a VPC to the Private Network
Next, we’ll want to connect a VPC to this Private Network. That is done using a Private Gateway.

create-private-gw

Creating a Private Gateway

private-gw-connected

Private Gateway is connected to the Private Network

Now, the VPC is connected to the Private Network. You will want to repeat this step for all VPCs you want to connect. In my case I added 3 VPCs with each one Private Gateway. Make sure they have an unique ip address on the Private Network.

overview-of-vpcs

Overview of VPCs created

VPC1 has CIDR of 10.1.0.0/16 and has a Private Gateway using 172.16.0.1 connected to the Private Network. VPC2 has 172.16.0.2 and VPC3 has 172.16.0.3 as its ip address on the Private Network.

Making the VPCs aware of each other
By setting static routes to the other VPCs, to their ip address on the Private Network, it becomes easy to route traffic.

vpc-route-table

Setting routes to the other VPCs

VPC1 now knows that 10.2.0.0/16 is reachable via 172.16.0.2 (VPC2) and 10.3.0.0/16 is reachable via 172.16.0.3 (VPC3). If you fill the route table for VPC2 and VPC3 in the same way (create routes to the CIDRs of the other VPCs) then all VMS in these three VPCs can reach each other!

vms-in-vpcs

Three VMS in their own VPC

traffic-over-private-network

Inter-VPC traffic over the Private Network

Best of all, you can create this as a Domain Admin user.

Improvements over Apache CloudStack:

  • A special network type Private was created, to make a clear distinction between types Guest, Public and Private (lots of hacks in the code removed)
  • Able to use Domain Admin user, instead of ROOT user (even the RBAC in CloudStack cannot delegate the creation of Private Gateways to non-ROOT users).
  • Add a Private Gateway without pre-setting up a VLAN or Lswitch
  • Able to set Static Routes in the Route Table on the VPC level, rather than on the Private Gateway level. This allows setting routes to anything the kernel of the router VM accepts which is very flexible.

Conclusion
Cosmic 5.3 has made connecting VPCs together a whole lot easier. The fact that Domain Admins can now set this up (using Terraform & friends) makes it an easy to consume feature. Combined with the flexible static routes, one can basically implement any network design.

Get Cosmic for free now!

In Cloud Orchestration , , , ,
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My keynote at the CloudStack Collaboration Conference in Dublin

8 October 2015 — 1 Comment

Here are the slides from my keynote presentation at the CloudStack Collaboration Conference in Dublin today.

Tomorrow I’ll do another presentation and talk about automation cloud operations!

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HOWTO discover the ip address of a Raspberry Pi

3 May 2013 — 2 Comments
When you boot your Raspberry Pi with Raspbian, it will get its ip address from a DHCP server. Most tutorials I’ve seen, ask you to login to a ‘router’ (that serves as DHCP server as well) to find the assigned ip address. When you haven’t access to the DHCP server, how do you find the Pi’s ip address?
You should know the MAC address of a Raspberry Pi always has a ‘b8:27:eb’ prefix. Using a Linux utility called ‘arp-scan‘ you can discover MAC addresses and their corresponding ip addresses. Arp-scan sends ARP packets to hosts on the local network and displays any responses that are received.
First, install arp-scan:
apt-get install arp-scan
Then locate all Raspberry Pi’s on the local network using this command:
arp-scan --interface=eth0 --localnet | grep b8:27:eb
You will need to be root, or arp-scan must be SUID root, in order to run arp-scan, because the functions that it uses to read and write  packets require root privilege.
Result:
172.16.12.34 b8:27:eb:00:11:ab (Unknown)
Using the ip address, it is now possible to SSH into your Raspberry Pi:
ssh -l pi 172.16.12.34
In Linux sysadmin , , , ,
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HOWTO connect to hosts on a remote network using OpenVPN and some routing

13 January 2013 — 42 Comments

OpenVPN is a very powerful tool to connect to a remote network in a secure and easy way. But while it’s quite easy to set it up (see my post about OpenVPN on Raspberry Pi), getting all the pieces together takes some more network understanding and configuration. I created an image to show what’s going on when a OpenVPN client connects to the server.

OpenVPN networking

The grey network is the local network you’re connecting to, the green network is created by OpenVPN. After a successful connection, the OpenVPN server can ‘push’ a route to the OpenVPN client to make it aware of the grey network that is available through the OpenVPN connection. In this case you’d add this setting to the OpenVPN server:

push "route 10.5.5.0 255.255.255.0"

Now that the OpenVPN client knows how to find the Linux server on the grey network, it should be working, right? Nope. The Linux server does not know about the green network. So, when a OpenVPN client connects with a 10.8.0.x ip-address, this server does not know where to send the response to. When this happens, the Linux server sends its traffic to the default gateway of the local network: the router of the grey network.

But unfortunately, the router does not know about the green network neither. Since 10.8.0.x is a non-routable address (RFC 1918), it drops the packets because it has no way of knowing where to find this private network. To the OpenVPN client, this may look like there’s something wrong with the VPN connection, because even a simple ping will not work and times out. In reality, this is a routing problem.

The solution? Make the Linux server or at least the router aware of the green network, and tell them where to send traffic to this network. This is done by adding a route like this:

route add -net 10.8.0.0/24 gw 10.5.5.5

Assuming the local network ip-address of the OpenVPN server is 10.5.5.5.

This way the hosts in the grey network know about the green network and send their traffic to the OpenVPN server. Of course the OpenVPN server knows how to reach the OpenVPN client and all is working!

You can extend this further and add routes to the network of the VPN client and make hosts on both networks communicate to each other. This is useful for example to connect a branch-office to the corporate network. I’ll write about this in more detail some other time.

Hopefully this post brings some insight in what goes on when using networks and VPN connections.

In Linux sysadmin , , , ,
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Securely connect an Advanced (private) CloudStack network by using a VLAN aware switch and a basic VPN device

18 November 2012 — 5 Comments

I’ve been working a lot with CloudStack Advanced networking and find it very flexible. Recently, I had another opportunity to test its flexibility when a customer called: “We want VM’s in your CloudStack cloud, but these VM’s are only allowed be reachable from our office, and not from the public internet”. Firewalling? No, they required us to use their VPN solution.

Is CloudStack flexible enough for this to work? Yes, it is. In this blog I’ll tell you how we did it. And it doesn’t even matter what VPN device you use. This will work regardless of brand and features, as lang as it supports a public ip-address to connect over the internet to another VPN device, and has a private network behind it. All VPN devices I know of support these basic features.

VPN (Virtual Private Networking)
The client’s office is connected to the internet and has a VPN device. We received another device as well to host in our data center and the two talk to each other over the public internet in a secure way. Probably speaking IPsec or similar but that is beyond the scope of this blog.

The VPN device in the data center has a public ip-address on its WAN port but also has some ports for the internal network. We configured it to use the same network CIDR as we did in the CloudStack network we created for this customer. Let’s use 10.10.16.0/24 as an example in this blog. And now the problem: this cloud network is a tagged network and the VPN device we received is not VLAN-capable.

VLANs in the Cloud
CloudStack Advanded networking relies on VLANs. Every VLAN has its own unique ID. Switches use this VLAN ID to keep the VLAN networks apart and make sure they’re isolated from each other. Most switches support VLANs as well, and that’s were we’ll find the solution to this problem.

Configuring the switch

We connected the VPN device to our switch and set its port to UNTAGGED for the VLAN ID the CloudStack network uses. In other words, devices connected to this port now do not need to know about the VLAN. The switch will add it as traffic flows. This means the VPN device will use an ip-address in the 10.10.16.0/24 range and is able to communicate with the VM’s in the same network. The CloudStack compute nodes have their switch ports set to TAGGED and the switch makes communication between them possible.

Overview of ip-addresses:

  • 10.10.16.1 – the internal VPN device ip-address in the data center
  • 10.10.16.11 – the first VM’s ip-address
  • 10.10.16.12 – the second VM’s ip-address

The VM’s have their default gateway set to the VPN device’s 10.10.16.1 address. Also, the office needs to be configured in a way it knows the 10.10.16.0/24 network is handled by the VPN device located there. Users in the office will now be able to access the VM’s on the 10.10.16.0/24 network.

Conclusion
While the VM’s are hosted on our CloudStack cloud on the internet, they do not have public ip-addresses and thus are not reachable. The only public ip-address for this customer is the one configured on the VPN device in the data center. This provides the same level of security as you’d have with physical servers but adds the power of a cloud solution.

Thanks to the flexibility of the CloudStack Advanced Networking this cloud be done!

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