Public cloud provider

Migration of Core Routing for a Public Cloud Provider on OpenStack

A core routing migration designed to maintain external connectivity while moving to a highly available physical network setup.

Unternehmen

Netherlands · 11–50 employees

The client is a public cloud provider from the Netherlands with infrastructure based on OpenStack. The company has between 11 and 50 employees.

For a cloud provider, stable external WAN connectivity is one of the critical elements of the infrastructure. Therefore, changes to core routing require a carefully prepared migration scenario with minimal or zero downtime.

Challenge

Cloudification needed to migrate the core routers from virtualized VyOS to a highly available pair of FS switches. At the same time, the BGP configuration for two WAN providers had to be migrated.

A key requirement of the project was to complete the migration with minimal downtime.

Project specifics

In this case, the changes affected the core routing of the cloud infrastructure.

BGP is used to exchange routing information between autonomous systems and is commonly used in infrastructures with multiple external connections. When two WAN providers are involved, the correctness of the BGP configuration directly affects external network connectivity.

Another important aspect of the project was the transition from virtualized VyOS routers to a highly available pair of FS switches. At the same time, the existing configuration for both WAN providers had to be migrated while keeping downtime to a minimum.

For this reason, preparing and validating the migration scenario before making changes to the production infrastructure became an important part of the project.

Solution

The Cloudification team developed a migration scenario for the core routers.

Before carrying out the work in the production environment, the scenario was tested in Graphical Network Simulator 3 (GNS3). This approach made it possible to validate the planned sequence of actions and the BGP configuration in a simulated network environment.

After the scenario had been tested, the routers were migrated from the virtualized and outdated version of VyOS to a highly available pair of physical FS switches.

The BGP configuration for two WAN providers was transferred to the new setup. The migration was carried out with the requirement of minimizing downtime.

Result

The core routers were successfully migrated from VyOS to FS switches. The BGP configuration for two WAN providers was transferred to the new infrastructure.

The migration scenario was developed and tested in GNS3 in advance, and the migration itself was completed with minimal downtime.