OVS to add virtual networking to code-base

The Open vSwitch (OVS) community has announced that it's adding virtual networking to its project.

As explained in this post, the Open Virtual Networking (OVN) project is designed to provide a “lightweight control plane” to support familiar virtual networking abstractions – in particular, Layer 2/3 networking only, so as not to clash with more general-purpose SDN controller capabilities.

The project will allow “users to connect groups of [virtual machines] or containers into private L2 and L3 networks, quickly, programmatically, and without the need to provision VLANs or other physical network resources,” the post claims.

The OVN architecture is explained at the OVS mailing list. OVN will use Open vSwitch, and will get its hypervisor integration from that project.

OVN will exist as a kind of overlay daemon in an OVS implementation. Configuration and state data will be stored in an OVN database, and the OpenFlow and OVSDB interfaces will be used to push that down to the OVS kernel.

The OVN database will hold information about the physical network; the logical network (including topology of logical switches and routers, ACLs, firewall rules and so on); and bindings.

The OVN project intends to write an OpenStack plugin for cloud management. The architectural description notes that there are still features in OVN that are yet to be fleshed out. ®