Configuring the Octavia Load Balancing service (optional)

Octavia is an OpenStack project which provides operator-grade Load Balancing (as opposed to the namespace driver) by deploying each individual load balancer to its own virtual machine and leveraging haproxy to perform the load balancing.

Octavia is scalable and has built-in high availability through active-passive.

OpenStack-Ansible deployment

  1. Create the openstack-ansible container(s) for Octavia

  2. Run the os-octavia playbook

  3. Eventually the os-neutron playbook needs to be rerun.

Setup a neutron network for use by octavia

Octavia needs connectivity between the control plane and the load balancing VMs. For this purpose a provider network should be created which bridges the octavia containers (if the control plane is installed in a container) or hosts with VMs. Refer to the appropriate documentation and consult the tests in this project. In a general case, neutron networking can be a simple flat network. However in a complex case, this can be whatever you need and want. Ensure you adjust the deployment accordingly. An example entry into openstack_user_config.yml is shown below:

- network:
   container_bridge: "br-lbaas"
   container_type: "veth"
   container_interface: "eth14"
   host_bind_override: "eth14"
   ip_from_q: "octavia"
   type: "flat"
   net_name: "octavia"
   group_binds:
     - neutron_linuxbridge_agent
     - octavia-worker
     - octavia-housekeeping
     - octavia-health-manager

Make sure to modify the other entries in this file as well.

There are a couple of variables which need to be adjusted if you don’t use lbaas for the provider network name and lbaas-mgmt for the neutron name. Furthermore, the system tries to infer certain values based on the inventory which might not always work and hence might need to be explicitly declared. Review the file defaults/main.yml for more information.

Octavia can create the required neutron networks itself. Please review the corresponding settings - especially octavia_management_net_subnet_cidr needs to be adjusted. Alternatively, they can be created elsewhere and consumed by Octavia.

Special attention needs to be applied to the --allocation-pool to not have ips which overlap with ips assigned to hosts or containers (see the used_ips variable in openstack_user_config.yml)

Note

The system will deploy an iptables firewall if octavia_ip_tables_fw is set to True (the default). This adds additional protection to the control plane in the rare instance a load balancing vm is compromised. Please review carefully the rules and adjust them for your installation. Please be aware that logging of dropped packages is not enabled and you will need to add those rules manually.

Building Octavia images

Note

The default behavior is to download a test image from the OpenStack artifact storage the Octavia team provides daily. Because this image doesn’t apply operating system security patches in a timely manner it is unsuited for production use.

Some Operating System vendors might provide official amphora builds or an organization might maintain their own artifact storage - for those cases the automatic download can be leveraged, too.

Images using the diskimage-builder must be built outside of a container. For this process, use one of the physical hosts within the environment.

  1. Install the necessary packages:

    apt-get install qemu uuid-runtime curl kpartx git jq python-pip

  2. Install the necessary pip packages:

    pip install argparse Babel>=1.3 dib-utils PyYAML

  3. Clone the necessary repositories

    git clone https://github.com/openstack/octavia.git
git clone https://git.openstack.org/openstack/diskimage-builder.git

  4. Run Octavia’s diskimage script

    In the octavia/diskimage-create directory run:

    ./diskimage-create.sh

  5. Upload the created user images into the Image (glance) Service:

    glance image-create --name amphora-x64-haproxy --visibility private --disk-format qcow2 \
   --container-format bare --tags octavia-amphora-image </var/lib/octavia/amphora-x64-haproxy.qcow2

    Note

    Alternatively you can specify the new image in the appropriate settings and rerun the ansible with an appropriate tag.

You can find more information abpout the diskimage script and the process at https://github.com/openstack/octavia/tree/master/diskimage-create

Here is a script to perform all those tasks at once:

#/bin/sh
apt-get install qemu uuid-runtime curl kpartx git jq
pip -v >/dev/null || {apt-get install python-pip}
pip install argparse Babel>=1.3 dib-utils PyYAML
pushd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/openstack/octavia.git
git clone https://git.openstack.org/openstack/diskimage-builder.git
pushd  octavia/diskimage-create
./diskimage-create.sh
mv amphora-x64-haproxy.qcow2 /tmp
popd
popd
#upload image
glance image-create --name amphora-x64-haproxy --visibility private --disk-format qcow2 \
  --container-format bare --tags octavia-amphora-image </var/lib/octavia/amphora-x64-haproxy.qcow2

Note

If you have trouble installing dib-utils from pipy consider installing it directly from source pip install git+https://github.com/openstack/dib-utils.git

Creating the cryptographic certificates

Note

For production installation make sure that you review this very carefully with your own security requirements and potantially use your own CA to sign the certificates.

The system will automatically generate and use self-signed certificates with different Certificate Authorities for control plane and amphora. Make sure to store a copy in a safe place for potential disaster recovery.

Optional: Configuring Octavia with ssh access to the amphora

In rare cases it might be beneficial to gain ssh access to the amphora for additional trouble shooting. Follow these steps to enable access.

  1. Create an ssh key

    ssh-keygen

  2. Upoad the key into nova as the octavia user:

    openstack keypair create --public-key <public key file> octavia_key

    Note

    To find the octavia user’s username and credentials review the octavia-config file on any octavia container in /etc/octavia.

  3. Configure Octavia accordingly

    Add a octavia_ssh_enabled: True to the user file in /etc/openstack-deploy

Optional: Enable Octavia V1 API

Beginning with the Queens release, neutron lbaas has started it’s deprecation cycle and therefore Octavia stand alone is the default configuration beginning Rocky. If the neutron lbaas endpoint is still needed consider deploying the neutron lbaas proxy plugin.

If for legacy reasons neutron lbaas still needs the internal Octavia V1 API endpoint add the following parameters to openstack_user_config.yml:

# Enable Octavia support in Neutron
neutron_lbaas_octavia: True
# Enable LBaaS V2
neutron_lbaasv2: True
# Disable Octavia V2 API/standalone
octavia_v2: False
# Enable Octavia V1 API
octavia_v1: True
# event_streamer - set to True if you are using neutron lbaas with Octavia
# (Octavia will stream events to the neutron DB)
octavia_event_streamer: True
# Enable provisioning status sync with neutron db
octavia_sync_provisioning_status: True

Please note that in some settings the LBaaS plugin is directly enabled in the neutron_plugin_base so adjust this as necessary.

Optional: Tuning Octavia for production use

Please have a close look at the main.yml for tunable parameters. The most important change is to set Octavia into ACTIVE_STANDBY mode by adding octavia_loadbalancer_topology: ACTIVE_STANDBY and octavia_enable_anti_affinity=True to ensure that the active and passive amphora are (depending on the anti-affinity filter deployed in nova) on two different hosts to the user file in /etc/openstack-deploy

To speed up the creation of load balancers or in a SINGLE topolgy to speed up the failover a spare pool can be used. The variable octavia_spare_amphora_pool_size controls the size of the pool. The system will try to prebuild this number so using too big a number will consumes a lot of unnecessary resources.