Introducing Open vSwitch
Open vSwitch is an open source OpenFlow-capable virtual switch. If you're familiar with VMware, think of it as an open source distributed virtual switch. To give you a fair idea of how great Open vSwitch (OVS) is, here is a brief feature list, as of version 2.3:
Visibility into inter VM communication via NetFlow and sFlow
Standard 802.1q VLAN model via trunking
Per VM interface traffic policing
NIC bonding
OpenFlow protocol support
Multiple tunneling protocols such as GRE, VxLAN, IPSec, and GRE over IPSEC
Mobility of states
See the full feature list here: http://Openvswitch.org/features/.
Comparison between Linux bridge and Open vSwitch
Before we go further and learn more about Open vSwitch including its architecture, let us quickly see how Open vSwitch is more feature-rich and powerful by comparing it with Linux bridge in terms of the operational functionalities provided:
|
Open vSwitch
|
