Deploying Contrail SDN Controller in a Nutanix Cluster | Nutanix Community
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This post was authored by Amin Aflatoonian, Enterprise Architect Nutanix

In our previous post, we presented an architectural overview of Contrail integration to the AHV cluster. In this post, we describe the deployment of this controller in detail.

A detailed description of virtual network and VM creation will be presented in the next post.

Deployment

To explain the deployment of Contrail on AHV, we used a lab environment containing a  three node Nutanix cluster. We present the lab architecture in the following figure.

Contrail AHV lab architecture

Because we don’t need to have a Contrail control HA, we deploy only one Contrail controller VM and three vRouter VMs (one vRouter per node).

We used Ansible to deploy Contrail. In this lab, we also created an Ansible deployer VM (called Contrail deployer) that manages the deployment lifecycle. For this purpose, we created a provisioning network in the Nutanix cluster and attached all Contrail VMs (controller and vRouters) to this network. The figure below shows the lab’s network configuration.

Contrail AHV lab - network configuration

Lab preparation

The following table shows the network configuration of this lab used to deploy Contrail VMs.

Lab networks configuration

Overlay bridge and vRouter overlay network

Before deploying Contrail VMs, create an overlay bridge (brOvly) on all Nutanix nodes. This bridge is isolated, without any link to the physical NIC  or to other OVS bridges. To create this bridge, you can use the allssh command from a CVM.

After creating the overlay bridge, create an overlay network that connects the vRouter VM to this bridge. To create this bridge, we used the Nutanix Acropolis CLI (acli).

Provisioning network

Contrail deployer, control, and vRouter VMs are all attached to the provisioning network. This network is used specifically by Contrail Deployer to install required packages on all Contrial nodes. In our lab, this network is created using the acli with VLAN ID 54.

Internal network

The data and control communication between Contrail nodes (Control and vRouter) is done through the internal network. Each Contrail VM is attached to this network.

Contrail VMs

Once all required bridges and networks are created, we can start spawning Contrail VMs. Before starting the deployment you need to spawn Contrail VMs. These VMs are based on CentOS 7 OS. The table below recaps all VMs we use in this deployment, including their resources, their host affinity rule (if exists), and their kernel version.

Contrail VM resource configuration

These VMs are deployed via Nutanix Prism Central (PC). For the sake of simplicity, we don’t describe the creation of each VM in detail.

The following table shows the IP address of each Contrail VM interface.

Contrail VM network configuration

Contrail deployment

The whole contrail deployment process passes inside the Contrail deployer VM. As mentioned previously, the deployment is done by Ansible. Before going further, we need to install three packages on this VM: ansible, python-pip, and requests.

Then, we clone all required Ansible playbooks from Juniper github.

Finally, we customize the instances.yaml file. The following is the instances file we use for this deployment. Note that you need to get the container registry username and password from Juniper Networks.

Once the instances file is completed, we use Ansible to configure our instances.

Then we deploy Contrail.

Contrail post deployment

Once the deployment is done successfully, you activate the vRouter on the Nutanix cluster by enabling the gateway mode on each vRouter.

To do so, on each vRouter VM edit the entrypoint.sh of the Contrail vRouter agent container; add “gateway_mode=server” in the rDEFAULT] section of that file; and restart the container.

Make sure that the vRouter is started and is running correctly.

The next step is to add three vRouters to the Contrail controller and establish the peering between the controller and vRouters. These steps are done via the Contrail UI.

From Contrail UI > Configure > Physical Devices > Physical Routers, click the “+ Add” dropdown menu and choose vCPE Router.

In the popup window, add the vRouter hostname (gathered by hostname command from vRouter VM) and its Internal IP address.

Then add the physical interface to the vRouter. From Configure > Physical Devices > Interfaces, choose the vRouter name and add a new interface (+ button). The type of the interface should be Physical, the name is eht1, and the connected interface is also eht1.

Repeat these two steps to add all the vRotuers to the Contrail controller.

Once all three vRouter are added to the list, from Monitor > Infrastructure > Control Nodes > contrail_control > Peers, you can see that the Peering between vRouters and the Contrail controller is established.

In this post we have discussed how to deploy Contrail on a Nutanix cluster. This example was based on a lab environment, and the size of VMs used for this lab was for the purposes of demonstration. If you want to use such a deployment for a production environment, please review the sizing of Contrail VMs based on your cluster capacity and Juniper Network recommendations.

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Is it this integration with Juniper Contrail or with “Open Contrail” that’s now is Tungsten Fabric that it have open source? Because the Juniper Contrail have a Contrail Command that it’s a diference between then, in open version don’t have many features because don't have the Command component.

I tried to do this procedure and I geted a many troubles in installation then I followed Juniper Contrail procedure, but I have Juniper Contrail Command when I create the Virtual Network not appear in Prism for create the VM in selected Virtual Network, my question is I need to make others integration thru the Webhook for this? How to do this integration?

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