[ovs-discuss] Open vSwitch balance-slb bond mode with two upstream switches

Jason Burns jason.burns at nutanix.com
Fri Aug 21 19:14:33 UTC 2015


I hope this is the right forum to ask this question. If not - feel free to direct me elsewhere.

Can the balance-slb bond mode in Open vSwitch be used for a bond connected to two separate upstream switches?

When I read the documentation [1] it states that only active-backup can be used to connect to two separate upstream switches, but no explanation is provided.

active-backup
                    Assigns  all flows to one slave, failing over to a backup
                    slave when the active slave is  disabled.   This  is  the
                    only bonding mode in which interfaces may be plugged into
                    different upstream switches

I read the INTERNALS [2] document to get more details on the complications with balance-slb, but after reading this I still don’t see anything that would prevent balance-slb from working when connected to two separate switches. My lab testing here is positive so far.

Am I missing some piece of information about why this is a bad idea? I’d like to take full advantage of the bond member bandwidth for the multiple virtual machines running on this host, AND get the fault tolerance that two separate switches provide. Ideally I’d be able to do this without any configuration on the switch side such as LACP. Is balance-slb a good way to do this, or is there some other way?

Thanks for your help!

[1] http://openvswitch.org/support/dist-docs/ovs-vswitchd.conf.db.5.html
[2] https://github.com/openvswitch/ovs/blob/master/vswitchd/INTERNALS

Jason Burns

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