Wednesday, October 14, 2015

How are OVS, OVN, OVSDB and OpenFlow related?

We have seen these OVS, OVN, OVSDB and OpenFlow in various technology articles.  Do you know how they are related?  Or are they related at all?

Well, they all start with the letter "O", this will be great for a Sesame Street episode for us to learn words with the letter "O".  

They all start with the letter O because they are all have "open" in their name.

With "open" in their name, does that make them related?

 OVS, OVN, OVSDB and OpenFlow are related but not because they have "open" in their name.

 Before we look at how they are related let us take an overview of what they are and some of the key concept that we need to know.  We can only take an overview of OVS, OVN, OVSDB and OpenFlow in this post as they by itself can be one or more blog post to cover.

OVS


OVS is the short form of Open vSwitch.  It is an open source software based virtual network switching module that can be deployed on hypervisor such as KVM or white box switching hardware.   Detail description of OVS can be found on it homepage and GitHub page. 

 A list of OVS feature can be found here.  The latest version is release 1.5

 OVS is heavily used in OpenStack as KVM is the most deployed hypervsior for OpenStack while OVS is the default virtual switching module for KVM.

 This diagram from OVS home page describe what OVS is:
image source: http://openvswitch.org/

 As you can see both OpenFlow and OVSDB is related to OVS.  Will discus this in more detail later in this post.

 

OVN


OVN stands for Open Virtual Network and is pronounced as "oven".  This is why the logo looks like the front of an oven.  It is a sub-project within OVS.

Back in March 2015, I have already written an article on OVN.  Please refer to this post for OVN details.

OVSDB

OVSDB is a protocol. It stands for Open vSwtch Database Management protocol. It is used to manage an Open vSwitch. This is the management plan for Open vSwitch. It is defined in RFC 7047.

The heart of OVSDB is the database or schema that defines the configuration of the OVS as well as the QoS policies. Management module uses the JSON-RPC as the transport to communicate with the ovsdb-server module of the OVS. (note: JSON = JavaScript Object Notation and JSON-RPC is a Remote Procedural Call encode in JSON format).

OpenFlow

OpenFlow is a protocol.  It is one form of  control plane for Open vSwitch and is defined in RFC 7149.

The main idea is to setup flow table that defines the action of a particular flow.  The basic action types are forward and drop with other optional/recommended actions such as flood, enqueue or modify field.  

This diagram explains the Flow Table:
 

Putting OVS, OVN, OVSDB and OpenFlow together

This diagram summarize the relationship between OVS, OVSDB and OpenFlow

 At this time OVN is part of OVS and uses the same interface ovsdb-server and ovs-vswitchd:

Summary

Both OVS and OVN are open source switching modules with OVSDB as the management plane and OpenFlow is used to program the flow from the controller to the OVS.
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

8 comments:

  1. BlueHost is definitely one of the best hosting company for any hosting plans you might need.

    ReplyDelete

  2. Nice blog, very short and clear. I am much clear with all O terms now :) thank you

    ReplyDelete

  8. Hello There,


    You make learning and reading addictive. All eyes fixed on you. Thank you being such a good and trust worthy guide.

    totally new here (and quite new in the kingdom of ML) and this is my first question;

    I am using XGBClassifier (latest version) in python training a dataset where the observations (should) have different weights. More specifically in am trying modelling the probability for an insurance policy to have a claim. The insurance policies may be on risk (have insurance cover) for different durations e.g. 1 month, 6 month 1 year creating the need to weight them according to how long they are on risk.

    Is it possible to pass this (N*1) vectors which sums up to 1 to the XGBClassifier? If so, is the implication of this that obs. with weights are more likely to be picked by the sampling algo?

    Hope somebody can enlighten me. Please let me know if I need to clarify something.

    Thanks a lot. This was a perfect step-by-step guide. Don’t think it could have been done better.

    Ciao,
    Pooja

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)