dhcp-agent and create_port question.

Chandan,

you're right, that it is not possible to determine agent_id from port data.
Can you provide the case in which you need to know which host runs dhcp server for given l2 network?
Depending on your use case it might worth filing a bug about this.

Hello Eugene,

I am trying to write a L2 plugin to orchestrate a physical switch.
I try to add a physical switch port to a vlan (mapped to a virtual network) when a virtual device (like a vm or a network device e.g. dhcp) shows up on a host. This is done dynamically in the plugin.

For a vm case it is possible to query nova and find the hypervisor host, i am trying to get the same information for dhcp and router. Till folsom i was assuming all network devices will show up on quantum server but now due to the quantum scheduler no more the case.

Also there can be more then one dhcp server in an L2 so i am finding it hard to determine which of the network node should i add to the vlan.

Thanks for your help

Chandan

If you're looking from plugin perspective, you should take a look how othe L2 plugins are implemented.
In particular, they inherit from agentschedulers_db.AgentSchedulerDbMixin class.
You may call get_dhcp_agents_hosting_networks and get agent object, which has host field, indicating at which host it is running.

I agree that it would be better that device_id of DHCP server port should be more meaningful (i.e., use agent id as uuidX in dhcp<uuidX>-<network_id>). We need to take care of dhcp-agent or l3-agent without state report.

For your purpose, if you know the host name where dhcp-agent is running, you can identify a network node by combining results of the following commands: (a) quantum agent-list -- and quantum dhcp-agent-list-hosting-net <network-id>. (though it is not a smart way i think).

Hello Eugene and Akihiro,

Thanks for the suggestions, i was doing exactly the same until i found that for a L2 network there can be more then one dhcp-agent. Now get_dhcp_agents_hosting_networks() for a network_id returns me a list of dhcp agents running on different network nodes. I dont find a way to which of this agents actually called the create_port.

Note: By default only one dhcp-agent is assigned to a L2 network but it is possible to assign more agent if the user does the following

quantum dhcp-agent-network-add <agent_id> <net_id>

This results in the create_port call and the plugin code doing get_dhcp_agents_hosting_networks() get a list of agents not know which one actually called the create_port.

I agree if we can find out the agent_id finding the host is easy.

Thanks again
Chandan

If you know the available set of DHCP agent hosts, you can determine the host that created the dhcp port by calculating and comparing the uuid5 of the hostname. The format of the identifier is dhcpX-network.id X is uuid.uuid5() of the hostname where the port is created and is a repeatable operation.

Here's the method we use to build the device_id:

def get_device_id(self, network):
        """Return a unique DHCP device ID for this host on the network."""
        # There could be more than one dhcp server per network, so create
        # a device id that combines host and network ids

        host_uuid = uuid.uuid5(uuid.NAMESPACE_DNS, socket.gethostname())
        return 'dhcp%s-%s' % (host_uuid, network.id)

Hello Mark,

Thanks for the pointer, so i need to compare device_id with result of the above function for each agent, right ?
is there any specific reason not to use the agent_id ?
Also is there a similar way of determining the host in case of multiple l3-agent ?

Thanks for the help
Chandan