OVS Fall 2014 Conference: Observations and Takeaways

Last week we hosted the Open vSwitch 2014 Fall Conference, which was another great opportunity to demonstrate our continued investment in leading open source technologies. To get a sense of the energy and enthusiasm at the event, take a quick view of this video we captured with attendees. I�ve been thinking about the key takeaways […]]> Last week we hosted the Open vSwitch 2014 Fall Conference, which was another great opportunity to demonstrate our continued investment in leading open source technologies. To get a sense of the energy and enthusiasm at the event, take a quick view of this video we captured with attendees.

I�ve been thinking about the key takeaways from everything I saw and everyone I spoke with.

First, there’s huge interest in Open vSwitch performance, both in terms of measurement and improvement. The talks from Rackspace and Noiro Networks/Cisco led me to believe that we’ve reached the point where Open vSwitch performance is good enough on hypervisors for most applications, and often faster than competing software solutions such as the Linux bridge.

Talks from Intel and one from Luigi Rizzo at the University of Pisa demonstrated that by bypassing the kernel entirely through DPDK or netmap, respectively, we haven�t reached the limits of software forwarding performance. Based on a conversation I had with Chris Wright from Red Hat, this work is helping the Linux kernel community look into reducing the overhead of the kernel, so that we can see improved performance without losing the functionality provided by the kernel.

Johann Tönsing from Netronome also presented a talk describing all the ways that Netronome’s NPU hardware can accelerate OpenFlow and Open vSwitch; I’ve talked to Johann many times before, but I had never realized how many different configurations their hardware supports, so this was an eye-opening talk for me.

Next, enhancing Open vSwitch capabilities at L4 through L7 is another exciting area. Our own Justin Pettit was joined by Thomas Graf from Noiro to talk about the ongoing project to add support for NAT and tracking L4 connections, which is key to making Open vSwitch capable of implementing high-quality firewalls. A later talk by Franck Baudin from Qosmos presented L7 enhancements to this capability.

The final area that I saw highlighted at the conference is existing applications for Open vSwitch today. Peter Phaal from InMon, for example, demonstrated applications for sFlow in Open vSwitch. I found his talk interesting because although I knew about sFlow and had talked to Peter before, I hadn’t realized all of the varied uses for sFlow monitoring data. Vikram Dham also showed his uses for MPLS in Open vSwitch and Radhika Hirannaiah her use case for OpenFlow and Open vSwitch in traffic engineering.

I want to thank all of our participants and the organizing committee for helping to put together such an amazing event.

Ben

from VMware Blogs http://bit.ly/1uxwP2V