The Design and Implementation of Open vSwitch

Authors: 

Ben Pfaff, Justin Pettit, Teemu Koponen, Ethan Jackson, Andy Zhou, Jarno Rajahalme, Jesse Gross, Alex Wang, Joe Stringer, and Pravin Shelar, VMware, Inc.; Keith Amidon, Awake Networks; Martín Casado, VMware, Inc.
Best Paper at NSDI '15: Link to Paper

Abstract: 

We describe the design and implementation of Open vSwitch, a multi-layer, open source virtual switch for all major hypervisor platforms. Open vSwitch was designed de novo for networking in virtual environments, resulting in major design departures from traditional software switching architectures. We detail the advanced flow classification and caching techniques that Open vSwitch uses to optimize its operations and conserve hypervisor resources. We evaluate Open vSwitch performance, drawing from our deployment experiences over the past seven years of using and improving Open vSwitch.

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