OVN Archives - Red Hat Developer Blog

Performance improvements in OVN: Past and future

By Mark Michelson January 2, 2019January 1, 2019

OVN (Open Virtual Network) is a subcomponent of Open vSwitch (OVS). It allows for the expression of overlay networks by connecting logical routers and logical switches. Cloud providers and cloud management systems have been using OVS for many years as a performant method for creating and managing overlay networks.

Lately, OVN has come into its own because it is being used more in Red Hat products. The result has been an increased amount of scrutiny for real-world scenarios with OVN. This has resulted in new features being added to OVN. More importantly, this has led to tremendous changes to improve performance in OVN.

In this article, I will discuss two game-changing performance improvements that have been added to OVN in the past year, and I will discuss future changes that we may see in the coming year.

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IP packet buffering in OVN

By Lorenzo Bianconi December 7, 2018December 6, 2018

Open Virtual Network (OVN) is a subproject of Open vSwitch (OVS), a performant, programmable, multi-platform virtual switch. OVN adds to the OVS existing capabilities the support for overlay networks by introducing virtual network abstractions such as virtual switches and routers. Moreover, OVN provides native methods for setting up Access Control Lists (ACLs) and network services such as DHCP. Many Red Hat products, such as Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Virtualization, are now using OVN, and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform will be using OVN soon.

In this article, I’ll cover how OVN ARP/ND_NS actions work, the main limitations in the current implementation, and how to overcome those. First, I’ll provide a brief overview of OVN’s architecture to facilitate the discussion:

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How to create an Open Virtual Network distributed gateway router

By Numan Siddique November 8, 2018

In this article, I discuss external connectivity in Open Virtual Network (OVN), a subproject of Open vSwitch (OVS), using a distributed gateway router.

OVN provides external connectivity in two ways:

A logical router with a distributed gateway port, which is referred to as a distributed gateway router in this article
A logical gateway router

In this article, you will see how to create a distributed gateway router and an example of how it works.

Creating a distributed gateway router has some advantages over using a logical gateway router for the CMS (cloud management system):

It is easier to create a distributed gateway router because the CMS doesn’t need to create a transit logical switch, which is needed for a logical gateway router.
A distributed gateway router supports distributed north/south traffic, whereas the logical gateway router is centralized on a single gateway chassis.
A distributed gateway router supports high availability.

Note: The CMS can be OpenStack, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Virtualization, or any other system that manages a cloud.

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Dynamic IP address management in Open Virtual Network (OVN): Part Two

By Mark Michelson September 27, 2018

In part one of this series, we explored the dynamic IP address management (IPAM) capabilities of Open Virtual Network. We covered the subnet, ipv6_prefix, and exclude_ips options on logical switches. We then saw how these options get applied to logical switch ports whose addresses have been set to the special “dynamic” value. OVN, a subproject of Open vSwitch, is used for virtual networking in a number of Red Hat products like Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in a future release.

In this part, we’re going to explore some of the oversights and downsides in the feature, how those have been corrected, and what’s in store for OVN in future versions.

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Dynamic IP Address Management in Open Virtual Network (OVN): Part One

By Mark Michelson September 3, 2018September 27, 2018

Some background

For those unfamiliar, Open Virtual Network (OVN) is a subproject of OpenVswitch (OVS), a performant programmable multi-platform virtual switch. OVN provides the ability to express an overlay network as a series of virtual routers and switches. OVN also provides native methods for setting up Access Control Lists (ACLs), and it functions as an OpenFlow switch, providing services such as DHCP. The components of OVN program OVS on each of the hypervisors in the network. Many of Red Hat’s products, such as Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Virtualization, are now using OVN. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform will be using OVN soon.

Looking around the internet, it’s pretty easy to find high-quality tutorials on the basics of OVN. However, when it comes to more-advanced topics, it sometimes feels like the amount of information is lacking. In this tutorial, we’ll examine dynamic addressing in OVN. You will learn about IP address management (IPAM) options in OVN and how to apply them.

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