[ovs-discuss] Re : Purpose of the configuration database

[Ben Pfaff]

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 07:44:56AM +0000, DarkBls wrote:
> It's own configuration database, we cannot have a centralized one ?
> 
> What is the purpose of ptcp:ip:port then ? Just to be able to have
> several instance of ovs-server on the same physical server ?

It makes sense to centrally configure a collection of Open vSwitches,
but the configuration database is not the way to do it.  Even if you
could use a single ovsdb-server process as the configuration for
multiple OVS instances, the results would not make all that much sense.
For example, you would probably not want to have the same ports on a
given bridge on multiple hosts, because you will probably have different
VMs running on any two different hosts, and you want to be able to
configure those VMs differently.

You can definitely use ptcp:port:ip as a listener on ovsdb-server.  But
you would connect to it remotely from, say, ovs-vsctl or an OpenFlow
controller that also speaks the OVSDB configuration protocol.  You would
not connect multiple ovs-vswitchd instances to it.