I am currently pursuing my VCDX certification and the design I have submitted is based on VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Integrated OpenStack. As part of the required documentation, I included a deployment guide — unfortunately, it is not as simple as laying down the SDDC components and the VIO vApp for the deployment.

This blog post will cover a couple items that are needed to get the two pieces playing together.


Shared Edge & Workload Cluster

The VCF architecture currently has a limitation that a vCenter Server can only have a single vSphere cluster — it’s a 1:1 relationship. VMware Integrated OpenStack requires either 3 clusters in a single vCenter Server or a management cluster in one vCenter Server instance and two clusters in a second vCenter Server. Neither of these options are compatible with VMware Integrated OpenStack.

In order to make it work, we are going to use a two vCenter Server deployment of VMware Integrated OpenStack and modify the OMS server to combine the NSX Edge and Workload Clusters into one. We do this by editing a single configuration file and restarting the oms service running on the VIO vApp Management (OMS) VM.

$ cd /opt/vmware/vio/etc
$ sudo vim moms.properties

Add the following line to the end of the file:
oms.allow_shared_edge_cluster = true

$ sudo restart oms

VMware Integrated OpenStack can now be deployed on top of VMware Cloud Foundation.


VXLAN-backed External Network

This one is a bit trickier and is an obstacle whether or not you are using VMware Cloud Foundation as the infrastructure layer.

Logically, the end result for the OpenStack external network is to attach to a VXLAN port group created by NSX. The NSX logical switch network is attached to the internal interface on a NSX Distributed Logical Router.

The following is the logical diagram for the architecture.

external openstack

The issue is that during the deployment of an OpenStack instance using VMware Integrated OpenStack, you have to specify an external network. However, VMware Integrated OpenStack will not allow a vSphere Administrator to select a VXLAN port group during the deployment. I got around this by creating a non-VXLAN port group on the DVS used only for the deployment.

Once the OpenStack deployment is complete, I needed to attach the actual VXLAN-backed port group as the external network.

SSH to the OMS server
$ ssh -l viouser oms.domain.local

SSH to an OpenStack controller VM
$ ssh controller01
$ sudo cp /root/cloudadmin_v3.rc .
$ source cloudadmin_v3.rc
$ neutron

(neutron) net-list
(neutron) net-create --provider:network_type=portgroup --provider:physical_network=virtualwire-XX vio-external-network
(neutron) net-list

The network will now appear in the OpenStack network list. Go ahead and create your subnet for the external IP addresses, based on the network assignment in your environment.

If you have questions or issues with implementing these changes in your environment, please reach out.