HN Explorer

Ask HN: What does HN think of Open vSwitch?

3 points by CSDude ↗ HN
I have been using it for a project for half a year, and it has been wonderful. It seems very powerful and packs a lot of features. But I do not see popularity of it that I think it deserves. Not here, not on the internet, tutorials are limited. Maybe I am looking at wrong direction, anyways. Do I over-estimate it or is it really that good but only a few people know it? It is even supported on Windows with Hyper-V virtual machines.

http://openvswitch.org

4 comments

[ 365 ms ] story [ 2791 ms ] thread
detaro
I think it's mostly not discussed around here because it is fairly low-level plumbing technology, as is a lot of other network tech. You don't see much discussion about SDN approaches, routing protocols, ... around here either. Most "users" of Open vSwitch probably don't know that it runs in the internals of the virtualization platform they are using, since it is hidden away under other layers.

I haven't used it much directly, but it is quite nice and a good piece of software in my opinion.

cryptoledgers
I intend to write some articles on it very soon. I am just shocked to find someone like yourself on HN. Will favourite your message and be in touch soon.
CSDude
Please hit me at mustafa91 at gmail com
benrockwood
I recently had reason to get involved in networking at a low level and used it as an opportunity to see what all the SDN buzz was about. I came to have a deep appreciation for Open vSwitch and, like you, was surprised at the lack of good documentation and tutorials.

The man pages are very good, but beyond simple bridging the documentation is weak and generally seems to assume the reader is familiar with a lot of concepts in advance. In particular, there seems to be tremendous power in using OVSDB to control OVS across nodes. There is even an OVN project that looks very interesting. However, it seems that most documentation assumes your either using Open Daylight (which is itself a complicated mess) or that your using OpenStack or similar.

OVS is definitely in need of some love from the wider community and needs to come out from the shadows.