For the most up-to-date list of supported network services, see the CloudPlatform UI or call listNetworkServices.
A network offering is a named set of network services, such as:
DHCP
DNS
Source NAT
Static NAT
Port Forwarding
Load Balancing
Firewall
VPN
Optional) Name one of several available providers to use for a given service, such as Juniper for the firewall
(Optional) Network tag to specify which physical network to use
When creating a new VM, the user chooses one of the available network offerings, and that determines which network services the VM can use.
The CloudPlatform administrator can create any number of custom network offerings, in addition to the default network offerings provided by CloudPlatform. By creating multiple custom network offerings, you can set up your cloud to offer different classes of service on a single multi-tenant physical network. For example, while the underlying physical wiring may be the same for two tenants, tenant A may only need simple firewall protection for their website, while tenant B may be running a web server farm and require a scalable firewall solution, load balancing solution, and alternate networks for accessing the database backend.
If you create load balancing rules while using a network service offering that includes an external load balancer device such as NetScaler, and later change the network service offering to one that uses the CloudPlatform virtual router, you must create a firewall rule on the virtual router for each of your existing load balancing rules so that they continue to function.
When creating a new virtual network, the CloudPlatform administrator chooses which network offering to enable for that network. Each virtual network is associated with one network offering. A virtual network can be upgraded or downgraded by changing its associated network offering. If you do this, be sure to reprogram the physical network to match.
CloudPlatform also has internal network offerings for use by CloudPlatform system VMs. These network offerings are not visible to users but can be modified by administrators.
