OpenStack Guide

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AFM Plug-in Overview
Use the Active Fabric Manager (AFM) plug-in for OpenStack to configure VLAN interfaces on the Dell Force10 Network
switches to orchestrate virtual networks through the AFM Restful APIs. The AFM plug-in enables you to configure
VLANs for a Layer 2 fabric, which is created by AFM administrators. It delegates the physical network configuration
logic to the AFM server by making requests to the AFM server through AFM Restful APIs. Upon receiving requests from
the OpenStack server restful API, the Dell Open vSwitch (OVS) agent and AFM plug-in create and maintain the logical
port infrastructure for the administrator to tag and untag VLANs.
There are 3 components to managing the physical, virtual networks, and bridges. The first component, AFM, manages
the physical network. The second and third components, the Dell OVS agent and AFM Plug-in for OpenStack, manages
the virtual networks and bridges. The AFM Plug-in runs on the controller. The Dell OVS agent runs on a Nova compute
and network node.
The AFM plug-in does the following:
• Plugs into the standard OpenStack Pluggable Networking Architecture.
• Allows the OpenStack Neutron server to communicate with AFM server.
• Integrates with the DELL AFM (Active Fabric Manager) through Restful APIs
• Provides dynamic VLAN configuration to fulfill OpenStack Cloud services Networking requirements.
• Provides dynamic discovery of Switch-Server connections through LLDP.
• Integrates with the AFM Layer 2 VLT topology to achieve switch-server connection redundancy using ‘Port Bonding’.
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