Physical Network

There are two types of networks in Private Cloud Director :

• Physical Networks
• Virtual Networks

A Physical Network is designed to map directly to an existing network in your data center. A physical network may be flat (i.e. with no segments), or using certain segments (e.g. VLAN or VXLAN), that provides connectivity to certain external resources outside the hypervisor cluster.

Types

Private Cloud Director supports following types of physical networks:

• Flat
• VLAN
• VXLAN

Flat Network

A flat network is a physical network with no VLAN tags. All VMs created in this network will be in the same broadcast domain. Flat networks do not require a network switch that does VLAN tagging, and are typically created in environments that prefer simple networking and do not require VLAN based isolation.

You can create at the most one flat network per physical network interface on your host.

VLAN Network

A VLAN network is a physical network that uses VLAN tagging. When you create a VLAN network, you will need to specify the VLAN ID for the network. VMs created in this network will have their broadcast domain restricted to be within this VLAN ID.

Note that if you plan to use VLAN networks for both physical and virtual networking, the VLAN ID range you specify for virtual networks must be different from the VLAN IDs used by your physical network infrastructure.

VXLAN Network

A VXLAN network is a physical network that uses VXLAN tunneling / overlay technology. When you create this network, you need to specify a segmentation ID (VXLAN ID).

External Networks

An External Network is a physical network that is publicly routable / enabled with access to internet. External networks enable:

• Your virtual machines to route packets from the internal network to the internet
• Assignment of Public IPs to your virtual machine to make them publicly addressable from the internet

To create an External Network, select the option called 'Allow use of Public IPs (External Network)' when creating a new physical network.

External Networks are shared by default, and this property can not be edited. This means External Networks are visible and accessible to all tenants. Self-service users from within tenants can create routers that can connect an internal network to an external network.

Public IPs

Once you designate a network as external network, you can then create one or more subnets for it and specify a range of IP addresses per subnet. This range of IP addresses will then be used to allocate 'Public IPs' (also called floating IPs when using the CLI) for your VMs.

Sharing

By default, a physical or a virtual network is created in the context of a tenant that will be the default owner of that network. A network can be explicitly marked as shared, which will make it accessible to all tenants.

Subnets

A subnet creates a smaller, more manageable network segment within a single IP network. You can create multiple subnets for a physical network.

Allocation Pools

Allocation pools are subsets of subnet CIDR and are used to control how IP addresses are assigned from the subnet.

• Addresses not in the allocation pool are not assigned to ports or virtual machines.
• Addresses outside the allocation pool but within the subnet CIDR can be used for static IP address assignment.

Create a Physical Network

You can create a new physical network by navigating to the Private Cloud Director UI then choosing 'Physical Networks' from the left side menu and then clicking on "Create Physical Network" button.

Following are the options you will choose while creating a physical network.

Create a Subnet

Following are the parameters you can choose when creating a new subnet:

Next Steps

Once you create one or more new physical networks, you may want to create a Router to enable traffic between networks.