
Ask HN: What does HN think of Open vSwitch? - CSDude
I have been using it for a project for half a year, and it has been wonderful. It seems very powerful and packs a lot of features. But I do not see popularity of it that I think it deserves. Not here, not on the internet, tutorials are limited. Maybe I am looking at wrong direction, anyways. Do I over-estimate it or is it really that good but only a few people know it? It is even supported on Windows with Hyper-V virtual machines.<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;openvswitch.org
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benrockwood
I recently had reason to get involved in networking at a low level and used it
as an opportunity to see what all the SDN buzz was about. I came to have a
deep appreciation for Open vSwitch and, like you, was surprised at the lack of
good documentation and tutorials.

The man pages are very good, but beyond simple bridging the documentation is
weak and generally seems to assume the reader is familiar with a lot of
concepts in advance. In particular, there seems to be tremendous power in
using OVSDB to control OVS across nodes. There is even an OVN project that
looks very interesting. However, it seems that most documentation assumes your
either using Open Daylight (which is itself a complicated mess) or that your
using OpenStack or similar.

OVS is definitely in need of some love from the wider community and needs to
come out from the shadows.

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detaro
I think it's mostly not discussed around here because it is fairly low-level
plumbing technology, as is a lot of other network tech. You don't see much
discussion about SDN approaches, routing protocols, ... around here either.
Most "users" of Open vSwitch probably don't know that it runs in the internals
of the virtualization platform they are using, since it is hidden away under
other layers.

I haven't used it much directly, but it is quite nice and a good piece of
software in my opinion.

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cryptoledgers
I intend to write some articles on it very soon. I am just shocked to find
someone like yourself on HN. Will favourite your message and be in touch soon.

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CSDude
Please hit me at mustafa91 at gmail com

