Can We Use Openstack Neutron as standalone component?

[Zeeshan Haider]

**Scenario**:
We are trying to develop our Virtual Network using `Open Virtual Network` or `OVN`, We need our Virtual Network Switches running firstly on the root Virtual Router, and there are some other Virtual Switches as well. I was Working on the `openvswitch` and `OVN` but a lot of things are missing for me, and there are some unlinked dots between the deployment itself and there are some problems. My Question has 3 further Parts.

 1. Is it possible at all to use `Neutron` as our Network Manager without OpenStack cloud installation?
 2. Is it a good approach?
 3. if not then are there any cookbooks available for `OVN`, I am not talking about man-pages.

Any help would be highly appreciated.

P.S. I am thinking about this because OVN got merged with Neutron, and it could be one of the possibilities.

**Note**: Please Don't downvote the question because I don't have that much experience with the network could be a stupid question, will remove it if you provide me the info in the comment section.

[Lajos Katona (lajos-katona)]

Hi,
I first went to these pages (I copy here the source, as google's indexing is a nightmare for finding the latest or versioned pages):
* https://opendev.org/openstack/neutron/src/branch/master/doc/source/ovn
* https://github.com/ovn-org/ovn/blob/master/Documentation/tutorials/ovn-openstack.rst

These pages mostly describe things with devsatck, but that can be a good starting point as it deploys an all-in-one "cloud" for you (multihost is an option, with another host with devstack on it tailored local.conf)

Generally Neutron needs authentication, and in Openstack that's Keystone, not sure what can be used instead of it.
As OVN itself is an SDN solution, I suppose it can be used without Neutron, it's NB DB is ovsdbm with documentation in the docs, so perhaps there's other projects that use it.

Not sure if I fully answered your questions.

[Brian Haley (brian-haley)]

> I was Working on the `openvswitch` and `OVN` but a lot of things are missing for me, and there are some unlinked dots between the deployment itself and there are some problems

Can you describe the issues?

> 1. Is it possible at all to use `Neutron` as our Network Manager without OpenStack cloud installation?

As Lajos mentioned, without other parts of the Openstack ecosystem (eg Keystone) I'm not sure it will be able to do what you're asking. The main goal of Neutron is to enable VMs (via Nova) to have network connectivity, so not exactly what you're asking for.

> 2. Is it a good approach?

Personally I don't think so.

> 3. if not then are there any cookbooks available for `OVN`, I am not talking about man-pages.

For OVN I would ask on it's mailing list, <email address hidden> - people there would be able to answer questions on how to use it better, and maybe give some pointers to something that might fit your needs.

[Akihiro Motoki (amotoki)]

First of all, as our task of the bug management, I am marking this as Invalid because it is not a bug but a question to the existing neutron feature.

Regarding your questions, In most cases, Lajos and Brian already gave good answers. One thing I would like to note is that neutron can be used as a standalone without other OpenStack components using auth_strategy=noauth, but it totally dpeneds on your needs. Note that keystone is the only component which neutron directly depends (if you use neutron with authentication) so additional overhead would not be so big. Most information and tools around cover neutron as a OpenStack component so if you really want to use this you need to understand what really happens by yourselves (and the upstream development team does not verify noauth mode in our CI).

In addition, in case of OVN with neutron, OVN covers most features as SDN controller and neutron mainly provides the integration with other OpenStack components like nova. Thus, I am not sure what is the merit you use stand-alone neutorn with OVN.

[Zeeshan Haider (zeeshanemallates)]

Ok Understood, now maybe this is a stupid question but still, I am gonna ask it. Is there any way to install openstack components one by one or decoupled installation for keystone API?

[Akihiro Motoki (amotoki)]

The way to install neutron is simple: to install neutron with pip (from PyPI package or the git repo), prepare a config file for neutron and start the neutron server (in case of OVN mechanism driver). Distro packages and/or various tools like Ansible playbook are just a wrapper for this. The minimum required config to enable noauth (ie without keystone) is to set auth_strategy to noauth in the config file.
I don't know the detail instruction step by step to satisfy your need.

[Brian Haley (brian-haley)]

BTW, I had the address of the OVS mailing list wrong above, it's <email address hidden>

[Zeeshan Haider (zeeshanemallates)]

Ok thank you guys I think that fulfills my needs :) Appreciate the help.