VLANs with Open vSwitch

Open vSwitch supports VLANS (Virtual LANs). You can create tagged as well as native VLANS on an OVS bridge to segment the network into different broadcast domains so that packets are only switched between ports that are designated for the same VLAN. The following are a few advantages of VLANs:

• Increased bandwidth usage: less broadcast traffic on segments

• Security enhanced: different VLANs cannot communicate directly

• Isolated environments for specialized network applications

Configuring VLANs for KVM virtual machines

Let's consider a scenario. In a single Open vSwitch bridge, add two different VLANs and connect four guests to it. Two in VLAN1 with tag 10 and the others in VLAN2 with tag 20. As a result, VMS can communicate in the same VLAN, whereas, between different VLANs, they cannot:

1. This walkthrough assumes you already have four virtual machines defined on the host and they are connected to an OVS bridge.

2. I am using an OVS bridge named vswitch001 and four fedora 21 VMs...