Open vSwitch

Open vSwitch is a multilayer virtual switch licensed under the open source Apache 2.0 license.

Open vSwitch is a multilayer virtual switch licensed under the open source Apache 2.0 license. It is designed to enable massive network automation through programmatic extension, while still supporting standard management interfaces and protocols such as NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, RSPAN, CLI, LACP, and 802.1ag. It is also designed to support distribution across multiple physical servers similar to VMware’s vNetwork distributed vswitch or Cisco’s Nexus 1000V. Open vSwitch can operate both as a soft switch running within the hypervisor, and as the control stack for switching silicon. It has been ported to multiple virtualization platforms and switching chipsets. It is the default switch in XenServer 6.0, the Xen cloud platform; and also supports Xen,KVM, Proxmox VE, and VirtualBox. It has also been integrated into many virtual management systems, including OpenStack,openQRM, OpenNebula, and oVirt. The kernel datapath is distributed with Linux, and packages are available for Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora. Open vSwitch is also supported on FreeBSD and NetBSD. Open vSwitch hosts a number of different mailing lists, including announce: to announce new versions of Open vSwitch; discuss: to discuss plans and design decisions for Open vSwitch; dev: to discuss development and review code before being committed; git: hooks into Open vSwitch’s version control system to receive commits; build: hooks into Open vSwitch’s continuous integration system to receive build reports; and [email protected]: a list for submitting security vulnerabilities to the security team.