[ovs-dev] [ovs-discuss] OVN, Bringing Native Virtual Networking to OVS

[Kyle Mestery]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 1:28 PM, Justin Pettit <jpettit at nicira.com> wrote:

> The Open vSwitch team is pleased to announce OVN, a new subproject in
> development within the Open vSwitch.  The full project announcement is at
> Network Heresy and reproduced below.  OVN complements the existing
> capabilities of OVS to add native support for virtual network abstractions,
> such as virtual L2 and L3 overlays and security groups.  Just like OVS, our
> design goal is to have a production-quality implementation that can operate
> at significant scale.
>
> --The Open vSwitch Team
>
> I'll be the first to say it:

"Awesome!"

Looking forward to seeing this evolve and develop inside the OVS project!

Thanks,
Kyle


> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
>
> OVN, Bringing Native Virtual Networking to OVS
>
> By Justin Pettit, Ben Pfaff, Chris Wright, and Madhu Venugopal
>
>
> Today we are excited to announce Open Virtual Network (OVN), a new project
> that brings virtual networking to the OVS user community. OVN complements
> the existing capabilities of OVS to add native support for virtual network
> abstractions, such as virtual L2 and L3 overlays and security groups. Just
> like OVS, our design goal is to have a production quality implementation
> that can operate at significant scale.
>
> Why are we doing this? The primary goal in developing Open vSwitch has
> always been to provide a production-ready low-level networking component
> for hypervisors that could support a diverse range of network
> environments.  As one example of the success of this approach, Open vSwitch
> is the most popular choice of virtual switch in OpenStack deployments. To
> make OVS more effective in these environments, we believe the logical next
> step is to augment the low-level switching capabilities with a lightweight
> control plane that provides native support for common virtual networking
> abstractions.
>
> To achieve these goals, OVN's design is narrowly focused on providing
> L2/L3 virtual networking. This distinguishes OVN from general-purpose SDN
> controllers or platforms.
>
> OVN is a new project from the Open vSwitch team to support virtual network
> abstraction. OVN will put users in control over cloud network resources, by
> allowing users to connect groups of VMs or containers into private L2 and
> L3 networks, quickly, programmatically, and without the need to provision
> VLANs or other physical network resources.  OVN will include logical
> switches and routers, security groups, and L2/L3/L4 ACLs, implemented on
> top of a tunnel-based (VXLAN, NVGRE, Geneve, STT, IPsec) overlay network.
>
> OVN aims to be sufficiently robust and scalable to support large
> production deployments. OVN will support the same virtual machine
> environments as Open vSwitch, including KVM, Xen, and the emerging port to
> Hyper-V.  Container systems such as Docker are growing in importance but
> pose new challenges in scale and responsiveness, so we will work with the
> container community to ensure quality native support.  For physical-logical
> network integration, OVN will implement software gateways, as well as
> support hardware gateways from vendors that implement the “vtep” schema
> that ships with OVS.
>
> Northbound, we will work with the OpenStack community to integrate OVN via
> a new plugin.  The OVN architecture will simplify the current Open vSwitch
> integration within Neutron by providing a virtual networking abstraction.
> OVN will provide Neutron with improved dataplane performance through
> shortcut, distributed logical L3 processing and in-kernel based security
> groups, without running special OpenStack agents on hypervisors. Lastly, it
> will provide a scale-out and highly available gateway solution responsible
> for bridging from logical into physical space.
>
> The Open vSwitch team will build and maintain OVN under the same open
> source license terms as Open vSwitch, and is open to contributions from
> all.  The outline of OVN’s design is guided by our experience developing
> Open vSwitch, OpenStack, and Nicira/VMware’s networking solutions.  We will
> evolve the design and implementation in the Open vSwitch mailing lists,
> using the same open process used for Open vSwitch.
>
> OVN will not require a special build of OVS or OVN-specific changes to
> ovs-vswitchd or ovsdb-server.  OVN components will be part of the Open
> vSwitch source and binary distributions.  OVN will integrate with existing
> Open vSwitch components, using established protocols such as OpenFlow and
> OVSDB, using an OVN agent that connects to ovs-vswitchd and ovsdb-server.
> (The VTEP emulator already in OVS’s “vtep” directory uses a similar
> architecture.)
>
> OVN is not a generic platform or SDN controller on which applications are
> built.  Rather, OVN will be purpose built to provide virtual networking.
> Because OVN will use the same interfaces as any other controller, OVS will
> remain as flexible and unspecialized as it is today.  It will still provide
> the same primitives that it always has and continue to be the best software
> switch for any controller.
>
> The design and implementation will occur on the ovs-dev mailing list.  In
> fact, a high-level description of the architecture was posted this
> morning.  If you’d like to join the effort, please check out the mailing
> list.
>
> Happy switching!
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> discuss mailing list
> discuss at openvswitch.org
> http://openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>