[ovs-discuss] recommended virtual networking environment for Open vSwitch

[Ashish Agarwal]

Re: problems with UML
I doubt my problem is significant and probably a better unix hacker could
figure it out. Basically, the kernel and filesystem images distributed by
Netkit do not include the directory /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build as
required to compile Open vSwitch. One cannot simply download these headers
from a standard distribution because Netkit applies some patches first.

I finally realized that I could compile the kernel myself, using Netkit's
build script which downloads the appropriate base kernel and applies their
patches. And the build script leaves the necessary header files as needed (I
guess they delete these in their distributions for some reason). However,
this new kernel does not work. My UML machines just crash on boot up or
something else strange happens. I'm still working on it, but wanted to
explore other options in the mean time.

Re: other virtualization tools
To my understanding Xen and KVM enable creating single machine instances.
The nice thing about Netkit is it also comes with scripts to trivially
connect multiple machines into a virtual network. Is there any easy
alternative? Basically, we want a virtual lab to test our networking code,
but don't want to spend hours manually configuring VMs every time we need a
new topology.



On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 5:28 PM, Ben Pfaff <blp at nicira.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 08, 2010 at 05:24:14PM -0400, Ashish Agarwal wrote:
> > So far we have been using Netkit as our tool for virtual networking.
> > However, after many hours I've been unable to install Open vSwitch in the
> > UML machines they distribute. What other virtualization environments are
> > people using Open vSwitch in? I would appreciate any recommendations.
>
> I'm interested in hearing what problems you had with UML.  If it's not
> too hard for us to support it, we should.
>
> I personally know of people using Open vSwitch with Xen and KVM.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://openvswitch.org/pipermail/ovs-discuss/attachments/20100908/d619f215/attachment-0001.html>