Native Open vSwitch firewall driver¶
Note
Experimental feature or incomplete documentation.
Historically, Open vSwitch (OVS) could not interact directly with iptables
to implement security groups. Thus, the OVS agent and Compute service use
a Linux bridge between each instance (VM) and the OVS integration bridge
br-int to implement security groups. The Linux bridge device contains
the iptables rules pertaining to the instance. In general, additional
components between instances and physical network infrastructure cause
scalability and performance problems. To alleviate such problems, the OVS
agent includes an optional firewall driver that natively implements security
groups as flows in OVS rather than the Linux bridge device and iptables.
This increases scalability and performance.
Configuring heterogeneous firewall drivers¶
L2 agents can be configured to use differing firewall drivers. There is no requirement that they all be the same. If an agent lacks a firewall driver configuration, it will default to what is configured on its server. This also means there is no requirement that the server has any firewall driver configured at all, as long as the agents are configured correctly.
Prerequisites¶
The native OVS firewall implementation requires kernel and user space support for conntrack, thus requiring minimum versions of the Linux kernel and Open vSwitch. All cases require Open vSwitch version 2.5 or newer.
- Kernel version 4.3 or newer includes conntrack support.
- Kernel version 3.3, but less than 4.3, does not include conntrack support and requires building the OVS modules.
Enable the native OVS firewall driver¶
On nodes running the Open vSwitch agent, edit the
openvswitch_agent.inifile and enable the firewall driver.[securitygroup] firewall_driver = openvswitch
For more information, see the Open vSwitch Firewall Driver and the video.
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