[ovs-discuss] Connecting two open vswitches on different hosts

[Justin Pettit]

On Jul 12, 2011, at 11:34 PM, Nicholas Bastin wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 02:31, Aniruddha Laud <trojan.of.troy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am following the cookbook at http://openvswitch.org/?page_id=146 . I don't
>> want to create one single bridge, but I want to be able to have open
>> vswitches running on different hosts and still be able to talk to each
>> other. In short, I want to remove the eth0 - eth0 connection mentioned in
>> the cookbook and replace it with a tunnel if possible, so that a VM on host1
>> can communicate with a VM on host2.
> 
> It probably depends on the type of tunnel, but I don't see any problem
> with this.  Ben or Justin might have more input on what kinds of
> interfaces you can use, but I would think that if you create any
> tunnel that creates an interface, you're ok - just add that interface
> to the bridge (instead of, or in addition to, eth0).


Sounds about right to me.  OVS supports a couple different tunnel types, but here's a command to attach a GRE tunnel to a bridge:

	ovs-vsctl add-port br0 gre0 -- set interface gre0 type=gre options:remote_ip=192.168.128.2

The physical interface (e.g., eth0) doesn't need to be attached to the bridge, since the host's IP stack will be used.

--Justin