In existing deployments, during upgrade from OSP17.x to OSP18, the network configuration of the host devices would be performed by os-net-config. os-net-config now has support of both ifcfg and nmstate providers with nmstate as the preferred one. Also ifcfg provider will be deprecated in next release. But changing the providers would require the interfaces to be brought down and reconfigured again with the new provider. This is expected to cause some down time.

The intent of this task is to be able to propose a procedure for host NIC configuration during upgrade so that the down times could be avoided or handled well