News

New Software-Defined Networking Tool Announced

Open Virtual Network is aimed at users of Open vSwitch and the OpenStack cloud platform.

• By Keith Ward
• 01/13/2015

The OpenStack community has a new network virtualization tool, meant to work hand-in-hand with the popular open source technology Open vSwitch (OVS).

OVS contributors Justin Pettit, Ben Pfaff, Chris Wright, and Madhu Venugopal announced Open Virtual Network (OVN) on a blog today. The purpose behind OVN is "… to support virtual network abstraction," they stated, describing its mission this way:

"OVN will put users in control over cloud network resources, by allowing users to connect groups of VMs or containers into private L2 and L3 networks, quickly, programmatically, and without the need to provision VLANs or other physical network resources.  OVN will include logical switches and routers, security groups, and L2/L3/L4 ACLs, implemented on top of a tunnel-based (VXLAN, NVGRE, Geneve, STT, IPsec) overlay network."

OVN is meant to be scalable to large environments, similar to OVS. OVN works with the same virtual machine (VM) technologies as OVS, including KVM, Xen and an upcoming integration with Microsoft Hyper-V. The emerging field of containers like Docker will be supported, as well, the blog said.

OVS is well known within the OpenStack community, as it's the most popular networking stack used for that cloud platform. OpenStack is used most frequently for private cloud deployments, either on-premises or hosted. OVN will be integrated with OpenStack through a plug-in.

OVN will come as part of the OVS source and binary distributions, and integrate with OVS components via standard protocols like OpenFlow. The OVS team will be responsible for building and maintaining OVN, using the same Apache 2.0 license as OVS.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a growing field within virtualization, but a recent survey of CIOs warned that deployment may be slower than anticipated by some.