Tag: Vagrant

Vagrant Box Catalog And Vagrant Box Repository Tutorial

Posted on by Marco Antonio Carcano

As we saw in the Vagrant - installing and operating post, Vagrant provides a convenient way for automating the setup, configuration and management of virtual machines, enabling reproducible and consistent development environments.

In that post, we also had an overview of how to create a Vagrantbox from scratch for the Parallels provider. We then digged further the process of creating Vagrant boxes from scratch in the Create Oracle Linux 10 aarch64 Vagrantbox for UTM post, where we generated a full featured Vagrant box for ARM64 using the UTM provider.

The missing part to complete your Vagrant skill sets is the creation of Vagrant Boxes Repositories, grouping them into a Vagratn Box Catalog and publish them on an HTTP server, so to make them available to other users.

Vagrant Box Catalog And Vagrant Box Repository Tutorial explains how to pack mutliple Vagrant boxes into a box repositotory and publish it on an HTTP server.

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Create Oracle Linux 10 aarch64 Vagrantbox for UTM

Posted on by Marco Antonio Carcano

On Apple Macs with Silicon processors, UTM is one of the best free virtualization options available, offering solid performance for ARM-based virtual machines.

As we saw in the Vagrant - installing and operationg post, Vagrant provides a convenient way for automating the setup, configuration, and management of virtual machines, enabling reproducible and consistent development environments.

Sadly, when dealing with Vagrant, there are only a few prebuilt Vagrant boxes supporting the UTM provider, which limits its out-of-the-box usability. Create ARM64 VagrantBox for Oracle Linux on UTM arch64 from Scratch shows how to create an aarch64 Oracle Linux 10 Vagrant box supporting the UTM ARM provider, making it easier to deploy and manage Linux VMs on Apple Silicon.

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Setup a GENEVE tunnel with OpenVSwitch and Podman

Posted on by Marco Antonio Carcano

Overlay networking enables to implement tunnels to interconnect networks defined inside a host (such as Docker/Podman private networks): for example flannel based Kubernetes uses VxLANs to interconnect the Minion’s private networks. Anyway VxLAN is only one of the available technologies: other technologies such as GENEVE, STT or NVGRE are available.

In this post we setup a GENEVE tunnel with OpenVSwitch and Podman - the described set up goes beyond the simple interconnection on of layer 3 network segments, interconnecting two Podman’s private networks configured with the same IP subnet (so they share the same broadcast domain) - the layer 2 data are exchange between the OpenVSwitch bridges on the two hosts through the GENEVE tunnel.

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SDN tutorial – OpenFlow with OpenVSwitch on Oracle Linux

Posted on by Marco Antonio Carcano

OpenVSwitch (OVS) is the pillar used by several emblazoned software, such as OpenStack or Red Hat's OpenShift to set up their Software Defined Networks (SDN): it enables users to quickly and easily implement multiple bridges to which connect Virtual Machines or Containers.

These bridges can be left standalone, creating isolated networks, or interconnected to the machine (or VM) NICs, providing bidirectional access to the network segment the NIC is connected to. In addition to that, it also enables the set up VxLAN Tunnel EndPoint (VTEP) on these bridges, enabling interconnecting OVS bridges from different machines. Last but not least, it also enforces traffic policies defined using OpenFlow.

The SDN tutorial - OpenFlow with OpenVSwitch on Oracle Linux, starts from where we left in the "Free Range Routing (FRR) And OpenVSwitch On OracleLinux" post, extending its Lab and provides a practical guide on how to write and set OpenFlow rules on OpenVSwitch.

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Free Range Routing (FRR) and OpenVSwitch on Oracle Linux

Posted on by Marco Antonio Carcano

In an Infrastructure As Code (IaC) scenario, rather than provision a VM and install a networking dedicated appliance, it is best to provide something without a web-UI but that provides a good configuration API or that sources its settings from something that can be easily managed by automated configuration tools.

In such as scenario it is more convenient to just use one (or more) Linux VM with a very basic installation, having it manage infrastructural networking: these VM can not only manage networking using routing protocol such as RIP, OCSP and even BGP, but also enforce security policies dropping unauthorised traffic.

In this post we see Free Range Routing (FRR) and OpenVSwitch on Oracle Linux in action, setting up a Lab with two virtual machines providing routing sharing routing tables using OCSP: we achieve this by installing Free Range Routing (FRR) - a free and open source Internet routing protocol suite for Linux. The advanced setup shown in this lab also makes use of OpenVSwitch, stacking FRR on top of it.

This dual layer setup enables us to exploit the Software Defined Networking (SDN) features provided by OpenVSwitch, enhancing by adding dynamic routing support, but also providing a compatibility layer with legacy bare metal devices such as "traditional" hardware routers.

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