This article explains how to design and implement hardware‑offloaded, IP‑ and port‑granular traffic shaping using Open vSwitch, OpenFlow meters, Mellanox HQoS, and DPDK, covering software limits, meter hierarchy, flow‑meter association, deletion workflows, RCU handling, and same‑host traffic considerations.
This article explains the challenges of using community OVS with Mellanox ConnectX‑6 NIC for hardware offload, details the design and implementation of Cx6 offload configuration, flow‑table match/action adaptation, Conn‑based large‑flow offload, and the coordination mechanism between hardware‑offloaded and software flow tables to achieve significant CPU savings while preserving security‑group and connection‑tracking correctness.
This article explains how to design, configure, and verify a VM traffic mirroring solution in a cloud VPC, covering capture sources, filtering methods, receiver setup, and practical OVS commands for security auditing, intrusion detection, and business analysis.
This article explains virtual network security mechanisms, including security groups, network ACLs, QoS policies, and quality‑assurance techniques, detailing implementations with Linux Bridge, iptables, OVS, conntrack, and DPDK, and discusses active probing and passive observation for network reliability.
This article explains how virtual networks operate in cloud computing by covering virtual NIC implementation, Virtio frontend/backend mechanisms, KVM signal interaction, and both layer‑2 and layer‑3 forwarding within a node using OVS and related technologies.
This guide explains the performance limitations of Neutron OVS networking, introduces SR‑IOV as a high‑performance I/O virtualization solution, and provides step‑by‑step configuration for enabling SR‑IOV agents, mapping physical networks, creating VLAN and flat networks, handling NUMA affinity, security groups, and bonding, with detailed command examples and XML snippets.
This article explains the complete OpenStack Neutron OVS networking stack, covering compute‑node, network‑node and control‑node models, dual‑node deployment, flow‑table design for flat, VLAN and VxLAN networks, L3 routing, external network integration and practical CLI examples.
This guide explains Open vSwitch's origins, core features, software architecture, key components such as ovsdb-server, ovs-vswitchd, and the kernel module, provides step‑by‑step installation on CentOS 7, and details configuration of bridges, ports, SSL, controllers, and flow handling for SDN environments.
China Unicom’s cloud‑native platform underwent a five‑month, multi‑data‑center upgrade that replaced its legacy virtual network with an OVN‑OVS‑smart‑NIC SDN control plane, delivering advanced scalability, high performance, and zero‑fault online migration for over 1,300 business applications.
This article explains how the kube-ovn-cni component functions as a CNI plugin in Kubernetes, detailing its cmdAdd interface, interaction with the kube-ovn daemon, creation of veth pairs, OVS bridge integration, and network namespace configuration to manage pod network interfaces securely and efficiently.
This article presents a detailed technical overview of how ByteDance selected Kube-OVN for a mixed virtual‑machine and container networking scenario, describes the initial network design, identifies performance issues, and outlines three improvement plans including OVS‑DPDK, source‑route optimization, and a switch from Geneve to VXLAN.
This article details ByteDance's technical evaluation and implementation of Kube-OVN as a CNI solution for hybrid virtual‑machine and container workloads, covering selection criteria, the initial network design, identified issues, subsequent optimizations, and future roadmap considerations within a cloud‑native Kubernetes environment.
The article provides a comprehensive overview of Kube-OVN, a powerful Kubernetes CNI plugin that leverages OVS to deliver enterprise‑grade overlay and underlay networking, multi‑NIC management, security policies, performance tuning, and monitoring, while also outlining its architecture, usage steps, and community resources.
This article walks through building a Go exporter that collects OVS bond status via shell commands, formats the data as Prometheus metrics, and deploys the service in a Kubernetes DaemonSet, providing step‑by‑step code, Dockerfile, and testing instructions.
This guide details the investigation of Mellanox CX‑5 NIC support for OVS flow‑table acceleration, outlines required software versions, explains VT‑d and SR‑IOV technologies, provides step‑by‑step host configuration, OVS setup, test procedures, performance results in VXLAN and VLAN environments, and explores the feasibility and scripts for VF hot‑migration.
This article explains the principles and performance characteristics of virtio networking, OVS virtual switching, and the related vhost‑net, vhost‑user, and vdpa mechanisms, comparing their architectures, data‑plane offloads, and suitability for cloud‑native environments.
After a Fusion Computer CNA node crashed and the VRM platform became unavailable, the author recovered lost virtual machines by locating disk images, fixing OVS flow tables, using an scp command with strict host‑key checking disabled, and recreating VMs, sharing key lessons for reliable operations.
DiDi Cloud’s network team replaced CPU‑bound OVS‑DPDK processing with programmable NICs, achieving sub‑150 µs VM‑to‑VM latency and up to 9.5 Mpps on 64‑byte packets, while overcoming offload, driver, and flow‑table challenges through extensive patches and open‑source contributions.
The article reviews the NSDI 2015 OVS paper, explaining OVS’s architecture, the challenges of OpenFlow‑based software switching, and the cache‑centric performance optimizations such as Tuple Space Search, MicroFlow and MegaFlow caching, while also suggesting further engineering improvements.
This article reviews the shortcomings of Kubernetes networking, explains the capabilities of OVS and OVN as unified solutions, maps OVN abstractions to Kubernetes concepts, and outlines future directions for enhancing cloud‑native network functionality, followed by an extensive Q&A session.
This article explains how to convert three‑layer routing into two‑layer switching (and vice‑versa) using OpenFlow and OVS, covering the differences between routing and switching, flow‑table configuration, ARP handling, TTL management, and practical Linux commands to achieve cross‑subnet communication without a traditional gateway.
