openstack-network-agents

A snap that packages the networking agents and utilities needed to run OpenStack on hosts with Open vSwitch (OVS) and OVN. It is designed to be co-located with MicroOVN (https://github.com/canonical/microovn) and is part of the Sunbeam (https://canonical-openstack.readthedocs-hosted.com/en/) project.

What it does

• Provider-bridge management: Creates OVS bridges, attaches physical NICs, and configures OVN physnet mappings for external network connectivity.
• NIC discovery: Identifies candidate uplink interfaces, filtering out virtual devices and bond members.
• CLI: Provides setup-bridge, show-bridge-setup, and list-nics subcommands for manual inspection and one-shot configuration.

Prerequisites

• Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble) or later
• MicroOVN installed and the ovn-chassis content interface connected

Install

sudo snap install openstack-network-agents

Configuration

The snap is configured through snap set keys and is typically driven by a Juju subordinate charm. All keys live under the network.* namespace:

• network.bridge-mapping (unset): Comma-separated bridge:physnet:interface triples. This is the preferred way to configure mappings.
• network.enable-chassis-as-gw (true): Register this chassis as an OVN gateway router.
• network.external-bridge-address (0.0.0.0/0): Static CIDR to assign to the bridge in localnet (single-node) mode.
• logging.debug (false): Enable debug logging for hooks and CLI.

Example:

sudo snap set openstack-network-agents  network.bridge-mapping="br-ex:physnet1:enp6s0"

CLI usage

The snap ships the openstack-network-agents command with several subcommands.

list-nics

List candidate uplink NICs (physical, bond, and VLAN interfaces that are not already claimed):

openstack-network-agents list-nics              # JSON (default)
openstack-network-agents list-nics -f table      # human-readable table

setup-bridge

Apply the current snap configuration to create/update OVS bridges and physnet mappings:

openstack-network-agents setup-bridge

show-bridge-setup

Display the current OVS bridge-to-physnet mappings detected on the host:

openstack-network-agents show-bridge-setup