Hi Geoff,
Thanks for the reply. We are indeed trying very similar things.
Are you seeing any strangeness with this?
About half the time, we're getting the NIC's wrongly associated with
IP's by the Cloudstack API (i.e. IP in Tier CIDR is reported against
shared network and vice versa). The machines themselves seem to work
fine. But port-forwarding seems not to work when this happens.
--A
On 08/02/2013 03:31, Geoff Higginbottom wrote:
Hi Alex,
I've actually been working on a similar problem myself. If I understand your
solution, it's to use a shared network connected to each tier of the VPC. If
this is correct, surely you are 'breaking' the VPC model as you have now
connected each Tier to a common shared network, meaning they are no longer
isolated.
What we tested today was to map a unique network to each Tier, each with a
unique VLAN and CIDR, using a custom network offering providing only DHCP
service. These networks were connected to a Firewall which enables a
management network to connect to each tier, but prevents the Tiers
communicating directly.
As you point out, VMs have to be deployed using the API not the GUI, and I can
confirm this works in CloudStack 4.0.
We did have to create 'shared' networks in order to create a VM connected to
both a VPC Tier and another Network (it does not work with an Isolated Network)
but as the Network is only connected to VMs belonging to one Tier, we did not
compromise the VPC isolation model.
One final step was to add a persistent route to each VM, ensuring traffic
destined for the 'management' network was routed over the secondary network and
not the default network which is connected to the VPC. This route can be added
manually, or by using the 'user data' feature to tell each VM which Gateway to
use (it's different for every Tier so cannot be baked into the template)
Regards
Geoff Higginbottom
CTO / Cloud Architect
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On 7 Feb 2013, at 19:51, "Alex Heneveld"
<alex.henev...@cloudsoftcorp.com<mailto:alex.henev...@cloudsoftcorp.com>> wrote:
An update on this. It seems there are currently 4 viable options for solving
this VPC mgmt access problem, summarised below. Thanks Chip and Alex (minor
questions in-line).
We're trying to set up a VPC/nTier-App such that a single VM (call it a
management node) outside the VPC has ssh access to the VM's inside the
VPC. (And to do this for multiple VPC's, same mgmt node.) What's the
best way to implement this?
1) Shared-network solution -- this is what we've done and I'm pleased to say it
works! (Alex, although this isn't exposed in the GUI, the API call to attach
an additional network to VPC nodes works fine -- in cloudplatform 3.0.5 at
least)
2) "DIY" remote access VPN [Chip's suggestion] -- Chip, if I understand your suggestion
correctly it's basically that we roll-our-own VPN on a VM in the VPC w/ ip-sec gateway to enable
remote-access ("road warrior") VPN'ing, since this isn't available out of the box for
VPC's (as per [1])
3) Port-forwarding on extra VPC public IP -- managing these assignments is
tedious (as Chip notes) but it is not as bad as it sounds; we've had to do this
before, in LXC-land where containers are isolated. it has benefit over #2 of
not needing a dedicated VPN endpoint VM in the VPC, and over #1 not attaching a
free-for-all mgmt network; but it isn't elegant or fun.
4) s2s VPN [Alex Huang's suggestion] - i think this is a nice option if you
already have the beefy hardware (Cisco / Juniper) that this requires, based on
the wiki [2] at least -- is that right? although it would be inefficient if
that hardware isn't local (b/c all traffic is routed through the remote
gateway) and also note there is a question in the wiki whether it will work
between zones (but I see no reason why it wouldn't?)
The mgmt VM can be in the same zone here (re Chip's question). If the mgmt VM
is in a different zone then #1 doesn't work (not unless you use it to set up a
proxy then use one of the other techniques to connect in to it).
It will be nice when #754 is implemented [1] as that seems better than any of
these. :)
I hope this is useful to anyone else needing to do this. Any comments or
corrections welcome. And happy to share the code if that's of interest.
Alex
[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CLOUDSTACK-754
[2] https://cwiki.apache.org/CLOUDSTACK/site-to-site-vpn.html
On 06/02/2013 17:23, Alex Huang wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Chip Childers [mailto:chip.child...@sungard.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2013 7:43 AM
To:
cloudstack-users@incubator.apache.org<mailto:cloudstack-users@incubator.apache.org>
Subject: Re: mgmt VM access to VPC
On Wed, Feb 06, 2013 at 02:23:08AM +0000, Alex Heneveld wrote:
Hi,
We're trying to set up a VPC/nTier-App such that a single VM (call it a
management node) outside the VPC has ssh access to the VM's inside the
VPC. (And to do this for multiple VPC's, same mgmt node.) What's the
best way to implement this?
It seems like #754 [1] would be the right way to go about this when
available (is that right?) but already there are a few things we could
do now:
- set up an extra public IP on each tier with careful port forwarding
and ACL restricted to the mgmt node
- use an s2s vpn where the other "site" is just the mgmt node
- use a shared network, seems supported based on #748 [2] (but this
would break isolation?)
Any thoughts on these or others?
TIA,
Alex
[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CLOUDSTACK-754
[2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CLOUDSTACK-748
Is this "other VM" going to be in a different zone?
This seems like you would have to consider it as being a completely
different entity from the VPC that it will be connecting into. With
that being the case, you're best off setting up an IP sec tunnel
into the VPC from that VM. I don't think you'll want to manage a bunch
of port forwarding rules for each VM in the VPC.
+1 I don't think shared network is supported by VPC at this point so s2s vpn
should be the best way to go.
--Alex
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