The design and implementation of open vSwitch
Ben Pfaff, Justin Pettit, Teemu Koponen, Ethan J. Jackson, Andy Zhou, Jarno Rajahalme, Jesse Gross, Alex Wang, Jonathan Stringer, Pravin Shelar, Keith Amidon, Martín Casado · Networked Systems Design and Implementation · 2015
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.