Hey all, I’ve been working on adding Bridge support to CloudStack. The use case is that with the introduction of SDN there is a need for us to link logical networks to physical hosts or physical networks. A typical use case would be to connect legacy infrastructure to cloud infrastructure, or to support cloud bursting from an existing infrastructure to a network in the cloud.
Routing can sometimes be used to accomplish the same effect (for example the private gateway option in a VPC), but in some cases a L2 connection is preferred. The functionality would a central bridge manager in CloudStack. The bridge manager would have a number of admin only commands that link a number of networks to a specified domain or account. The user commands would allow an account to link a logical network to an external physical network. This separation is done to ensure users are never able to configure a bridge to a network they shouldn’t have access to. Admins will have to make an external network available as a bridge destination and a user can select it. The network implementation will consists of a BridgeProvider element extension which elements can implement. It’s up to the elements to configure the particulars of their bridge implementation. Initial implementation will cover the admin commands, user commands and an implementation in the VMware NSX plugin. UI is out of scope for the first implementation. Any feedback is welcome :D Cheers, Hugo
