Hello all, On the OVS homepage, under the heading "What is Open vSwitch?" it states: "Open vSwitch is a production quality, multilayer virtual switch [...]"
My understanding of a multilayer switch is one that not only does traditional layer two switching, possibly with multiple VLANs (i.e maintains separate L2 forwarding tables for each VLAN) but that also can do routing between such VLANs (via virtual VLAN interfaces) without requiring an outboard router. In a testbed setup (comprised of a single Ubuntu Linux box) that I recently constructed to learn more about Open vSwitch (and OpenFlow, though that is ancillary to this discussion) I instantiated a OVS soft-switch that has three VLANs on it: VLAN 10 - actual physical ports (interfaces = eth0, eth1, etc.), used to communicate with physical infrastructure VLAN 20 - VM hosts (interfaces = vnet0, vnet1, etc - in this case, I'm using KVM with libvirt) VLAN 30 - connection to a router virtualization platform (Dynamips/Dynagen/GNS3) via a tuntap interface [see http://www.gns3.net for more detail if desired] In looking into how to then configure routing between the three VLANs within OVS, and not finding anything on the OVS site, I finally came upon this article: http://blog.scottlowe.org/2010/04/23/configuring-inter-vlan-routing/ So, it seems that the (current) OVS switch implementation is not what I'd think of as a "multilayer" switch, as it seems that you have to use the Linux kernel routing to perform the routing between the "vlanX" interfaces (and this would be an "outboard" router to OVS to me.) Am I confused as to the nature of "multilayer" in the OVS context? And, is it true that routing between VLANs (at least at this point) be handled by an "outboard" router, or can OVS handle inter-VLAN routing "natively" somehow? Please do not interpret this as any sort of a "slam" on OVS, it's amazing software and quite useful to me just as it is... Just trying to understand. Thanks for reading and responding...
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