The Open vSwitch team announced the availability of Open vSwitch 1.0.0. Open vSwitch is a multilayer virtual switch licensed under the open source Apache 2 license.
The 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 Platform. 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 current release of Open vSwitch supports the following features:
- Visibility into inter-VM communication via NetFlow, sFlow(R), SPAN, and RSPAN
- Standard 802.1Q VLAN model with trunking
- Per VM policing
- NIC bonding with source-MAC load balancing
- Support for OpenFlow
- Ethernet over GRE
- Compatibility layer for the Linux bridging code
- Kernel and user-space forwarding engine options
As part of the 1.0 release, the Open vSwitch Team stated, "The changes related to supporting the new configuration database were quite extensive, so future updates should occur more frequently. We are working on adding support for priority-based QoS exposed through OpenFlow's slicing calls, IPsec tunneling, and port security. We are also working with hardware vendors to bring Open vSwitch to their platforms as well. Expect to hear more about that soon!"
The following features are on the Open vSwitch roadmap, however they aren't 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)
Download Open vSwitch 1.0.0.