Q: What is Open vSwitch?
A: Open vSwitch is a production quality open source software switch
- designed to be used as a vswitch in virtualized server environments. A
- vswitch forwards traffic between different VMs on the same physical host
- and also forwards traffic between VMs and the physical network. Open
- vSwitch supports standard management interfaces (e.g. sFlow, NetFlow,
- RSPAN, CLI), and is open to programmatic extension and control using
- OpenFlow and the OVSDB management protocol.
+ designed to be used as a vswitch in virtualized server
+ environments. A vswitch forwards traffic between different VMs on
+ the same physical host and also forwards traffic between VMs and
+ the physical network. Open vSwitch supports standard management
+ interfaces (e.g. sFlow, NetFlow, IPFIX, RSPAN, CLI), and is open to
+ programmatic extension and control using OpenFlow and the OVSDB
+ management protocol.
Open vSwitch as designed to be compatible with modern switching
chipsets. This means that it can be ported to existing high-fanout
http://openvswitch.org/mlists/
-
Releases
--------
It should build against almost any kernel, certainly against 2.6.18
and later.
+Q: What Linux kernel versions does IPFIX flow monitoring work with?
+
+A: IPFIX flow monitoring requires the Linux kernel module from Open
+ vSwitch version 1.10.90 or later.
+
Q: Should userspace or kernel be upgraded first to minimize downtime?
In general, the Open vSwitch userspace should be used with the
for OpenFlow 1.2 and 1.3. On these versions of Open vSwitch, the
following command enables OpenFlow 1.0, 1.2, and 1.3 on bridge br0:
- ovs-vsctl set bridge br0 protocols=openflow10,openflow12,openflow13
+ ovs-vsctl set bridge br0 protocols=OpenFlow10,OpenFlow12,OpenFlow13
Support for OpenFlow 1.1 is incomplete enough that it cannot yet be
enabled, even experimentally.