OVS connected to virtual machines

Let's now move our attention to networking with virtual machines with OVS as the switch interconnecting the VMs. The following diagram depicts two VMs interconnected via an Open vSwitch virtual switch:

Figure 3: Open vSwitch network with VMs

We will start by creating an Open vSwitch bridge, add tap ports to it to hook VMs, and show how the VMs interconnect via OVS switch. The tap interfaces simulate a link layer operating with L2 packets such as Ethernet frames. These are virtual ports where virtual machines plug in.

1. We will create an OVS bridge and bring it up in order to assign IP address.

   

2. Next, we need to create and activate the tap interfaces:

   

3. The add-port option of ovs-vsctl command is used to add the virtual ports to the Open vSwitch.

   

4. Let us now check the status of these ports.

   

5. We will now view the complete OVS bridge information.

   

6. In order to create and configure virtual machines we will use CirrOS VM images. These images are very small and the...