Open vSwitch Containers

Containerized versions of Open vSwitch

Building

To install just run make. This will build new images with the tags ovs-vswitchd, ovsdb, ovn-northd, and ovn-controller.

Using

These containers need to share /usr/local/var/run/openvswitch, so they can communicate, and privileged access to the host and its network interfaces. This is primarily so ovs-vswitchd can load the ovs kernel module.

Typical deployment

The following script will boot ovsdb and ovs-vswitchd per [INSTALL.md]

docker run -d --net=host --name=ovsdb-server quay.io/netsys/ovsdb-server

docker run -d --volumes-from ovsdb-server --privileged --net=host \
--name=ovs-vswitchd quay.io/netsys/ovs-vswitchd

Then the usual ovs utitlies like ovs-vsctl, ovs-ofctl, etc... can be run by simply prepending docker exec ovs-vswitchd, or docker exec ovsdb depending on which utility you are running, to the command line.

OVN Overlay Network with Docker

If you wanted to use OVN to create an overlay network between docker containers using geneve tunneling between hosts, the following scripts would do the job (See [INSTALL.Docker.md] for more details about using OVN with docker).

On the northd host:

docker run -d --net=host --name=ovsdb-server quay.io/netsys/ovsdb-server

docker run -d --net=host --volumes-from ovsdb-server --name=ovn-northd \
quay.io/netsys/ovn-northd -v /var/run/docker.sock

On each host running containers:

docker run -d --net=host --name=ovsdb-server quay.io/netsys/ovsdb-server

docker run -d --volumes-from ovsdb-server --privileged --net=host \
--name=ovs-vswitchd quay.io/netsys/ovs-vswitchd

docker run -d --net=host --volumes-from ovsdb-server --name=ovs-northd \
quay.io/netsys/ovn-northd

docker exec ovn-controller ovn-docker-overlay-driver --detach

Then, to create a logical switch, run:

docker network create -d openvswitch --subnet=192.168.1.0/24 foo

and connect containers by passing --net=foo to docker when running new containers.