[ovs-discuss] General Question from Open vSwitch Beginner

Hugo hugolin615 at gmail.com
Wed Mar 16 23:33:42 UTC 2011


Hi,

I saw a similar thread which use the Virtual Box and Open vSwitch. But I
could not find the answer from that thread. Anyway, I will post some
experiment here and from the experiment, I hope that I can have a better
understanding of Open vSwitch.

Experiment 1.
There is no VM in this experiment. I just install OVS in a debian host
machine. I follow the instruction in INSTALL.Linux. And I start up
"ovsdb-server" and "ovs-vswitchd" by executing the commands from
INSTALL.Linux too. There is no problem at this point. Then I run

% ovs-vsctl add-br br0
% ovs-vsctl add-port br0 eth0

eth0 is the only physical NIC in my host machine, it has the IP address
assigned, I can access the network from this NIC before. After doing this,
my host machine will not be able to access the network. My understanding is
that this actually emulating the real situation that connecting port from a
physical switch to a physical NIC by a ethernet cable. Then of course, the
machine could not access the internet.
However, in the real situation, usually a port from a physical switch can be
connected to the network through a ethernet cable. And we can go into the
switch's console to configure the physical switch (such as setup DNS) to
make it access to the network. I just wondering how can I configure the Open
vSwitch in any similar way to let it be able to access network?

Experiment 2
I install a VM in a VirtualBox. Instead of NAT, I choose the Network adapter
as "Host-Only", and in this way, the Guest VM will connect through a
interface named "vboxnet0". This "vboxnet0" is network interface from
VirtualBox. It is visible from ifconfig in my HOST debian machine. I still
start up "ovsdb-server" and "ovs-vswitchd" by executing the commands from
INSTALL.Linux. I run (of course, I delete eth0 from br0)

% ovs-vsctl add-br br0
% ovs-vsctl add-port br0 vboxnet0

After doing this, the Virtual VM is not able to access the network. I am
just wondering what should I do in order to make the VM to be able to access
the network. Do I have to do some configuration in Guest VM as well as Open
vSwitch? I think these two experiments are simple, I hope from your answer,
I can better understand how Open vSwitch works and then I can try scenarioes
in cookbook.

Best,

Hugo
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