>On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 11:14:55AM +0530, Shravan S K wrote: >> We are looking to buy a few OpenFlow-enabled switches. What advantages can >> be achieved by a hardware switch that also supports OVS? >> And can a hardware openflow L2 switch perform L3,L4 based openflow >> forwarding - can I inspect L3,L4 layers and take a decision based on them ? > >It's hard to tell. No one ever comes to us and says that they base >their switch on OVS. You have to guess.
For the record, Allied Telesis have a range of switches that use OVS. Your first question is a bit ambiguous. Are you wanting advantages in using a hardware switch or advantages in using a hardware switch that uses OVS? If the former, then I would say it's all about performance. Hardware switches should be able to perform at wire-speed on all ports, once flows are present in hardware. The advantage for a switch using OVS is slightly less obvious. We use many of the wonderful features of OVS, but not all of them. The advantage of using OVS in particular is compliance, reliability and feature set. For your second question, we can do L3 forwarding in hardware because this involves MAC address and VLAN tag changes which we do support in hardware. L4 actions (NAT for example) not so much in hardware, but we do support these flows in software. Anything we can't do in hardware we will do in software. But performance will not be wirespeed. But you can do L3/L4 matches in hardware, Hope that helps. Tony _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-discuss
