As part of a larger fun project I’m working on (OVS for the ALIX platform; more to come on that once I have it 100% working), I have been playing a lot with OVS . It’s a great platform, and as others have mentioned , it’s as close to an SDN reference data plane implementation as we have. I’d be surprised if many if not all commercial implementations of OpenFlow aren’t based on OVS. Anyway, I wanted to build debian packages since I’d never done it before and thought it’d be fun. I wanted to use OVS2 so that I can play with some of the newer features and specifically to see how well the IPv6 support is in 2.0 when paired with OpenDaylight (more to come on this, too. I promise =). This proved to be more simple than I anticipated mostly due to lots of good documentation. To accomplish it, I decided to start with a VM since I lie to work in virtualized environments for experimentation and lambing. I spun up a Debian 7 VM from scratch and began configuring it as I usually do with the inclusion of the tools necessary to build packages. *** I originally tried this from the git repo via git clone git://openvswitch.org/openvswitch but kept seeing weird errors so I moved to the 2.0.0 tarball. *
apt-get -y install screen sudo vim etckeeper mlocate autoconf2.13 \
libssl-dev graphviz python-all python-qt4 python-zopeinterface \
python-twisted-conch tcpdump build-essential fakeroot debhelper \
gdebi-core pkg-config
Grab the OVS tarball
wget [http://openvswitch.org/releases/openvswitch-2.0.0.tar.gz](http://openvswitch.org/releases/openvswitch-2.0.0.tar.gz)
mv openvswitch-2.0.0.tar.gz openvswitch-2.0.0.orig.tar.gz
cd openvswitch-2.0.0
dpkg-buildpackage -b
cd ../
Install all of the packages ( # Answer Y to all prompts )
gdebi openvswitch-datapath-source_2.0.0-1_all.deb
module-assistant auto-install openvswitch-datapath gdebi openvswitch-common_2.0.0-1_amd64.deb gdebi openvswitch-switch_2.0.0-1_amd64.deb
You should now be able to check the version:
buraglio@deb7ovs-vm:/home/buraglio# ovs-vsctl -V
ovs-vsctl (Open vSwitch) 2.0.0
Compiled Nov 29 2013 13:18:32
Check the OpenFlow versions supported:
buraglio@deb7ovs-vm:/home/buraglio# ovs-ofctl -V
ovs-ofctl (Open vSwitch) 2.0.0
Compiled Nov 29 2013 13:18:32
OpenFlow versions 0x1:0x4
More to come on this. For anyone that doesn’t want to build the .debs themselves, they’re available to download from here , no warranty implied or expressed =)