The Citrix Open vSwitch appears online
In May, during its main conference Synergy, Citrix announced the existence of an open source virtual switch that may compete with the Nexus 1000V that Cisco made available for VMware vSphere.
In early June, the Citrix CTO Simon Crosby shared a very few details about it, but so far most of the virtualization community doesn’t know much about it. But the official website about the project quietly appeared online now: the product is called Open vSwitch and is released under the Apache 2 open source license.
The first release (which is almost complete and available online as well) is designed to support distributed networking (like the Cisco Nexus 1000V) and includes the following features:
- Visibility into inter-VM communication via NetFlow, SPAN, and RSPAN
- Standard 802.1Q VLAN model with trunking
- Per VM policing
- NIC bonding with source-MAC load balancing
- Kernel-based forwarding
- Support for OpenFlow
- Compatibility layer for the Linux bridging code
(The Open vSwitch can be even used inside a plain Linux distribution in place of operating system bridge)
On top of that the following features are part of the roadmap:
- User-space forwarding engine
- sFlow
- Compatibility layer for VDE
- Ethernet over GRE (for ERSPAN and virtual private network creation)
- Full L3 support + NAT
- Priority-based QoS
- More management interfaces (IOS-like CLI, SNMP, NetFlow)
- 802.1x/RADIUS
- Support for hardware acceleration (VMDQ, switching chips on SR-IOV NICs)
The version available online is near the 1.0 (0.90.4), but it’s only available as source code.
The online documentation already explains how to use it with a XenServer 5.5 host.
virtualization.info Newest articles
December 20th, 2011
Oracle has released version 4.1.8 of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. This version which can be considered a maintenance release can be installed on top of any VM VirtualBox 4.1.x…
December 20th, 2011
VKernel, recently acquired by Quest Software has released version 4.5. of its vOperations Suite (vOps). vOperations is a suite of products providing Performance Analysis, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and…
December 7th, 2011
Teradici is the developer of the PC-over-IP (PCoIP) remote desktop protocol, which is leveraged in software (by VMware view) and provided with Teradici hardware solutions which are OEM’ed by several…
December 7th, 2011
Citrix has released a whitepaper titled:"Windows 2008 R2 Optimization Guide For Desktop Virtualization with XenApp 6 / 6.5", the paper which contains 23 pages outlines optimization for XenApp 6 and…
December 6th, 2011
In November Microsoft released a public beta of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) version 6.5. Today Microsoft announced its release, which is the follow-up of version 6.0 which…
December 6th, 2011
Open source vendor Red Hat has released version 6.2 of its Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This version is the follow-up of version 6.1 which was released in May…
December 6th, 2011
Microsoft has released version 3.2 of the Linux Integration Services for its hypervisor Hyper-V. This version is the follow-up of version 3.1 which was released in July this year.
The…
November 29th, 2011
Since its first official release beginning 2009, the Virtual Session Indexer(VSI) has gained popularity as an independent benchmarking tool. One of the projects using the VSI tool is Project Virtual…
November 21st, 2011
VMware has released version 4.1 of its desktop virtualization platform for Apple Mac: Fusion. This release is considered an minor upgrade for version 4.0 which was released in September this…
November 21st, 2011
In September VMware released a new major version of its virtualization platform Workstation 8.0 and in October it released Player 4.0. Now VMware released an update for its virtualization platform…
November 17th, 2011
VMware has released version 4.7 of of its application virtualization solution ThinApp. This version includes the ability to use ThinApp packages in combination with its Software as a Service (SaaS)…
November 17th, 2011
VKernel, provider of performance and capacity management products, has announced its acquisition by Quest Software. VKernel will operate as a independent subsidiary of Quest.
VKernel entered the virtualization market in…
November 16th, 2011
Lanamark has released a new version of its Capacity Planning platform Suite, this version is the follow up of version 2010 which was released in March last year.
Suite 2012…
November 15th, 2011
In November last year, started releasing Solaris 11 Express, the development version eventually leading to the release of Oracle Solaris 11 which was released last week. Solaris is one of…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress




