Chapter 8: Contrail Vrouter Agent

Its a agent module for Vrouter. It interacts with control node behalf of vrouter. Receiving configuration such as routing instance etc push it to VRouter. Reporting the statitistics, status etc to the analytics engine.

In North Bound, interacts with Control Node on XMPP Protocol.

In South Bound interacts with Vrouter on NetLink Protocol.

It alsproxy the DHCP,DNS,ARP Messages.

More details are here

Contrail Vrouter

• Contrail Vrouter is a kernel module (vrouter.ko)
• Its a Data Plane / Forwarding plane
• Provides Data path to the VMs/Instances in Openstack (Similar functionality of OpenvSwitch data plane)
• MPLS Based Virtual Router
• Will be installed in each COMPUTE Machine
• Interacts with Vrouter Agent for configuring/controlling the vroutes.

The above image is referred from the contrail architecutre document.

• VRouter Internals

  • Maintains Routing Instance per Virtual Network
  • VIF(Virtual Interfaces) of VM will be associated with the VRF(Virtual Routing and Forwarding) table of the Routing Instance.

  • MPLS Based traffic forwarding .

    You can read more details about contrail packet forwarding here.