Due to an unfortunate incident involving sleep mode and an overheated backpack I had the “opportunity” to rebuild my laptop. Since this meant reinstalling OpenStack I used this as an excuse to finally move to the ML2 network plugin for Neutron.

I was attempting to add an external network using the normal incantation:

neutron net-create external -- --router:external=true \
    --provider:network_type=flat \
    --provider:physical_network=physnet1

While this command completed successfully, I was left without any connectivity between br-int and br-ex, despite having in my /etc/neutron/plugins/ml2/ml2_conf.ini:

[ml2_type_flat]
flat_networks = *

[ovs]
network_vlan_ranges = physnet1
bridge_mappings = physnet1:br-ex

The reason this is failing is very simple, but not terribly clear from the existing documentation. This is how the neutron-server process is running:

/usr/bin/python /usr/bin/neutron-server \
  --config-file /usr/share/neutron/neutron-dist.conf \
  --config-file /etc/neutron/neutron.conf \
  --config-file /etc/neutron/plugin.ini \
  --log-file /var/log/neutron/server.log

This is how the neutron-openvswitch-agent process is running:

/usr/bin/python /usr/bin/neutron-openvswitch-agent \
  --config-file /usr/share/neutron/neutron-dist.conf \
  --config-file /etc/neutron/neutron.conf \
  --config-file /etc/neutron/plugins/openvswitch/ovs_neutron_plugin.ini \
  --log-file /var/log/neutron/openvswitch-agent.log

Note in particular that neutron-server is looking at /etc/neutron/plugin.ini, which is a symlink to /etc/neutron/plugins/ml2/ml2_conf.ini, while neutron-openvswitch-agent is looking explicitly at /etc/neutron/plugins/openvswitch/ovs_neutron_plugin.ini. The physical network configuration needs to go into the ovs_neutron_plugin.ini configuration file.