[ovs-discuss] OVS and routing

Jesse Gross jesse at nicira.com
Tue Feb 12 19:34:40 UTC 2013


On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 1:01 AM, Kristoffer Egefelt <kristoffer at itoc.dk> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Could I drop hardware Layer 2 switching entirely, and route traffic directly from the hypervisor/ospf ?
>
> I'm trying to eliminate STP, utilize multiple links, avoid downtime during upgrade of switch-stack etc I was wondering if the following would be possible:
>
> Uplink       Uplink
>   |            |
>   |            |
> Router1 ---- Router2
>   |   \    /   |
>   |    \  /    |
>   |     \/     |
>   |     /\     |
>   |    /  \    |
>   |   /    \   |
> Server1 ---- Server2
>   | |         | |
>   | |         | |
>   OVS         OVS
>    |           |
>    |           |
>   VM          VM
>
> Routers and Servers run OSPF - the only layer 2 traffic is inside openvswitch <-> VM
>
> But does OVS depend on layer2 hardware interfaces to function?
> I don't see how OVS would handle the two interfaces without layer2 access for bonding, so this is probably a long shot ? :-)

OVS doesn't implement any routing protocols or support routing
directly.  You would have to use some kind of external OpenFlow
controller to handle that and then OVS will process packets on the
fast path.



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