On May 29th, the Fedora Project announced the release of Fedora 17, the latest version of Red Hat sponsored free open source operating system distribution that includes Open vSwitch.
Open vSwitch can be used to manage virtual networks across a virtual infrastructure and it is a key component for Fedora’s virtual network management capabilities.
With Open vSwitch, Fedora’s users could create, manage and monitor virtual networks using the software network switch, as is explained in this tutorial.
Open vSwitch provides kernel support for comparable packet forwarding performance and allows scaling across a large number of servers while managing through a central controller.
Open vSwitch kernel module is compatible with the linux bridge module for KVM virtual machines, and uses libvirt to manage the VMs.
The kernel datapath is already distributed with Linux, and packages are available for Ubuntu, Debian, and now Fedora.
As stated in the news of openvswitch.org:
The recently released Fedora 17 comes with improved support for open vswitch. It includes packages for installing open vswitch as well as libvirt support for managing open vswitch under KVM. Open vswitch is an interesting project providing a multilayer software switch that provides enterprise grade virtual switching technology and the emerging and popular openflow protocol for managing networks.