Open Stack

* Dan Wendlandt (dan at nicira.com) wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 5:23 AM, andi abes <andi.abes at gmail.com> wrote:
> > late to the party... but I'll dabble.
> >
> > On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 12:21 PM, Chris Wright <chrisw at sous-sol.org> wrote:
> >> * Rob_Hirschfeld at Dell.com (Rob_Hirschfeld at Dell.com) wrote:
> >>> We've been discussing using Open vSwitch as the basis for non-Quantum Nova Networking deployments in Folsom.  While not Quantum, it feels like we're bringing Nova Networking a step closer to some of the core technologies that Quantum uses.
> >>
> >> To what end?
> >
> > OVS provides much more robust monitoring and operational facilities
> > (e.g sFlow monitoring, better switch table visibility etc).
> 
> You won't find any disagreement from me about OVS having more advanced
> capabilities :)
> 
> > It also provides a linux-bridge compatibility layer (ovs-brcompatd
> > [1]), which should work out-of-box with the linux-bridge. As such,
> > switching to using OVS rather than the linux bridge could be done
> > without any code changes to nova, just deployment changes (e.g. ensure
> > that ovs-brcompatd is running to intercept brctl ioctl's - [2]).
> 
> Using ovs-brcompatd would be possible, though some distros do not
> package and run it by default and in general it is not the "preferred"
> way to run things according to email on the OVS mailing list.

Indeed.  While it's doable, it's not something that will hit upstream
Linux, and therefore will not be supported by some distros.

But, in general...while adding OVS support to nova networking (in the
simplest layer 2 switch mode), may not be much work.  It's adding a (not
particularly useful) feature to a code base that we hope to deprecate.
And making it more useful (adding things like tunnelling) support are
really the point of Quantum.

thanks,
-chris