[ovs-discuss] L3 Support and NAT

Justin Pettit jpettit at nicira.com
Mon Jun 27 07:35:12 UTC 2011


I would recommend making use of the existing NAT and conntrack functionalities provided by Linux--there's a lot there to reinvent.  In a precursor to OVS, we attempted to directly integrate NAT functionality into our OpenFlow switch, and it never really came together well (the reasons are lightly touched on in this thread: http://tinyurl.com/3gq5r7d).

You should be able to set your ports up in such a way that your switching between ports is handled by OVS, and your "external" interface is handled (and configured) through Linux's L3/NAT stack.  A proper design has not been hashed out yet, but I imagine that we may take a somewhat similar, but more feature-rich, approach when we add support. 

--Justin


On Jun 23, 2011, at 4:57 AM, Holger Winkelmann [TP] wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm actually evaluating to use openvswitch to replace the traffic forwarding
> function in one of out L3 Gateways to make it programmable by the Openflow API.
> We have the requirement to NAT/PAT on the device and we also need some NAT helper
> for certain protocols.
> 
> Can anybody tell me how this will work in the ovs context? Can existing NAT, Conntrack,
> NAT Helper code reused when using ovs datapath? Or do we need to reinvent this?
> 
> In the announcement: http://virtualization.info/en/news/2010/05/open-vswitch-reaches-1-0.html
> I read about:
> 
> * Full L3 support (with NAT)
> 
> Would be great to know about the status for L3 and NAT. Thanks for any advise,
> 
> Holger
> 
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