Open vSwitch

Open Source Virtual Switch

Nicira Concept

Can Run as a stand alone hypervisor switch or as a distributed switch across multiple physical servers

Default switch in XenServer 6.0, Xen Cloud Platform and supports Proxmox VE, VirtualBox, Xen KVM

Integrated into many cloud management systems including OpenStack, openQRM, OpenNebula, and oVirt

Distributed with Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora Linux. Also FreeBSD

14-17

Open vSwitch Features

Inter-VM communication monitoring via:

NetFlow: Cisco protocol for sampling and collecting traffic statistics (RFC 3954)

sFlow: Similar to NetFlow by sflow.org (RFC 3176)

Jflow: Juniper’s version of NetFlow

NetStream: Huawei’s version of NetFlow

IPFIX: IP Flow Information Export Protocol (RFC 7011) - IETF standard for NetFlow

SPAN, RSPAN: Remote Switch Port Analyzer – port mirroring by sending a copy of all packets to a monitor port

GRE-tunneled mirrors: Monitoring device is remotely

connected to the switch via a GRE tunnel

14-18

Open vSwitch Features (Cont)

Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP)

IEEE 802.1Q VLAN

IEEE 802.1ag Connectivity Fault Management (CFM)

Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) to detect link faults (RFC 5880)

IEEE 802.1D-1998 Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)

Per-VM traffic policing

OpenFlow

Multi-table forwarding pipeline

IPv6

GRE, VXLAN, IPSec tunneling

Kernel and user-space forwarding engine options

14-19

OVSDB

Open vSwitch Database Management Protocol (OVSDB)

Monitoring capability using publish-subscribe mechanisms

Stores both provisioning and operational state

Java Script Object Notation (JSON) used for schema format and for JSON-RPC over TCP for wire protocol (RFC 4627)

RPC Methods: List databases, Get Schema, Update, Lock, …

Open vSwitch project includes open source OVSDB client and

server implementations

Ref: B. Pfaff and B. Davie, “The Open vSwitch Database Management Protocol,” IETF draft, Oct 2013, http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pfaff-ovsdb-proto-04

14-20