Chapter 4. Preparing overcloud templates for DCN deployment

Your environment must meet the following prerequisites before you create a deployment using separate heat stacks:

This document provides an example deployment that uses separate heat stacks on Red Hat OpenStack Platform. This example environment has the following limitations:

To segment your deployment within separate heat stacks, you must first deploy a single overcloud with the control plane. You can then create separate stacks for the distributed compute node (DCN) sites. The following example shows separate stacks for different node types:

CephAnsibleExtraConfig:
  public_network: '172.23.1.0/24,172.23.2.0/24'

You can configure multiple stacks to use the same network resources, such as VIPs and subnets. You can duplicate network resources between stacks by using either the ManageNetworks setting or the external_resource_* fields.

If you are not reusing networks between stacks, each network that is defined in network_data.yaml must have a unique name across all deployed stacks. For example, the network name internal_api cannot be reused between stacks, unless you intend to share the network between the stacks. Give the network a different name and name_lower property, such as InternalApiCompute0 and internal_api_compute_0.

With the ManageNetworks setting, multiple stacks can use the same network_data.yaml file and the setting is applied globally to all network resources. The network_data.yaml file defines the network resources that the stack uses:

- name: StorageBackup
  vip: true
  name_lower: storage_backup
  ip_subnet: '172.21.1.0/24'
  allocation_pools: [{'start': '171.21.1.4', 'end': '172.21.1.250'}]
  gateway_ip: '172.21.1.1'

When you set ManageNetworks to false, the nodes will use the existing networks that were already created in the central stack.

Use the following sequence so that the new stack does not manage the existing network resources.

When you add new network resources, for example when you add new leaves in a spine/leaf deployment, you must update the central stack with the new network_data.yaml. This is because the central stack still owns and manages the network resources. After the network resources are available in the central stack, you can deploy the additional stack to use them.

If you need more control over which networks are reused between stacks, you can use the external_resource_* field for resources in the network_data.yaml file, including networks, subnets, segments, or VIPs. These resources are marked as being externally managed, and heat does not perform any create, update, or delete operations on them.

Add an entry for each required network definition in the network_data.yaml file. The resource is then available for deployment on the separate stack:

external_resource_network_id: Existing Network UUID
external_resource_subnet_id: Existing Subnet UUID
external_resource_segment_id: Existing Segment UUID
external_resource_vip_id: Existing VIP UUID

This example reuses the internal_api network from the control plane stack in a separate stack.

The procedures in this guide show how to organize the environment files for three heat stacks: central, dcn0, and dcn1. Red Hat recommends that you store the templates for each heat stack in a separate directory to keep the information about each deployment isolated.

To deploy more DCN sites, create additional dcn directories by number.

Use the following procedure, and its example file contents, to retrieve the container images you need for deployments with separate heat stacks. You must ensure the container images for optional or edge-specific services are included by running the openstack container image prepare command with edge site’s environment files.

For more information, see Preparing container images.

To use fast datapath services at the edge, you must create a custom role that defines both fast datapath and edge services. When you create the roles file for deployment, you can include the newly created role that defines services needed for both distributed compute node architecture and fast datapath services such as DPDK or SR-IOV.

For example, create a custom role for distributedCompute with DPDK:

You can use this same method to create fast datapath roles for SR-IOV, or a combination of SR-IOV and DPDK for the edge to meet your requirements.

If you are planning to deploy edge sites without block storage, see the following:

If you are planning to deploy edge sites with Ceph storage, see the following: