Quick Start for Physical CORD POD

This guide is meant to enable the user to utilize the artifacts of this repository to to deploy CORD on to a physical hardware rack. The artifacts in this repository will deploy CORD against a standard physical rack wired according to the best practices as defined in this document.

Physical configuration

Physical Hardware Connectivity

As depicted in the diagram above the base model for the CORD POD deployment contains:

  • 4 OF switches comprising the leaf - spine fabric utilized for data traffic
  • 4 compute nodes with with 2 40G ports and 2 1G ports
  • 1 top of rack (TOR) switch utilized for management communications

The best practices in terms of connecting the components of the CORD POD include:

  • Leaf nodes are connected to the spines nodes starting at the highest port number on the leaf.
  • For a given leaf node, its connection to the spine nodes terminate on the same port number on each spine.
  • Leaf n connections to spine nodes terminate at port n on each spine node.
  • Leaf spine switches are connected into the management TOR starting from the highest port number.
  • Compute nodes 40G interfaces are named eth0 and eth1.
  • Compute nodes 10G interfaces are named eth2 and eth3.
  • Compute node n is connected to the management TOR switch on port n, egressing from the compute node at eth2.
  • Compute node n is connected to its primary leaf, egressing at eth0 and terminating on the leaf at port n.
  • Compute node n is connected to its secondary leaf, egressing at eth1 and terminating on the leaf at port n.
  • eth3 on the head node is the uplink from the POD to the Internet.

The following assumptions are made about the phyical CORD POD being deployed:

  • The leaf - spine switchs are Accton 6712s
  • The compute nodes are using 40G Intel NIC cards
  • The compute node that is to be designated the head node has Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installed.

Bootstrapping the Head Node

The head node is the key to the physical deployment of a CORD POD. The automated deployment of the physical POD is designed such that the head node is manually deployed, with the aid of automation tools, such as Ansible and from this head node the rest of the POD deployment is automated.

The head node can be deployed either from a node outside the CORD POD or by deploying from the head the head node. The procedure in each scenario is slightly different because during the bootstrapping of the head node it is possible that the interfaces needed to be renamed and the system to be rebooted.

Bootstrapping the Head Node from Outside the POD

To deploy the head node it is assumed that the node is reachable from outside