About
What is Open vSwitch?
Open vSwitch is a multilayer virtual switch licensed under the open source Apache 2 license. Our goal is to build a production quality switch for VM environments that supports standard management interfaces (e.g. NetFlow, RSPAN, ERSPAN, IOS-like CLI), and is open to programmatic extension and control. In addition, it is designed to support distribution across multiple physical servers similar to VMWare’s distributed vswitch or Cisco’s Nexus 1000v.
Open vSwitch currently supports multiple virtualization technologies. It is the default switch in the Xen Cloud Paltform. And it supports open source Xen, XenServer, KVM, and VirtualBox. The bulk of the code is written in platform-independent C and is easily ported to other environments.
The stable release of Open vSwitch supports the following features:
- Visibility into inter-VM communication via NetFlow, SPAN, and RSPAN
- Standard 802.1Q VLAN model with trunking
- Per VM policing
- NIC bonding with source-MAC load balancing
- Kernel-based forwarding
- Support for OpenFlow
- Compatibility layer for the Linux bridging code
The unstable release of Open vSwitch has the following additional features:
- sFlow(R)
- User-space forwarding engine
The development release of Open vSwitch includes:
- Compatibility layer for VDE
- Ethernet over GRE (for ERSPAN and virtual private network creation)
- Priority-based QoS
The following are on the roadmap but not currently being worked on:
- Full L3 support (with NAT)
- More management interfaces (IOS-like CLI, SNMP, NETCONF)
- 802.1x/RADIUS
- Support for hardware acceleration (VMDQ, switching chips on SR-IOV NICs)