Vyatta

Vyatta's open-source software router provides a way of adding routing and security functions to virtual environments (Xen, VMWare and Hyper-V).

Vyatta recently announced the availability of the Core 6 Alpha release, adding sFlow support. This early alpha release (the production version in due in early 2010) can be downloaded now. If you want to try it out, the bootable live CD version offers a quick way to see how the router works without dedicating a server to the project.

The following configuration sets the sampling rate on interface eth0 to 1-in-100 and sends sFlow to a collector at 10.0.0.50:

system {
 flow-accounting {
  interface eth0 {
   sampling-rate 100
  }
  sflow {
   agentid 0
   server 10.0.0.50 {
   }
  }
 }
}

Note: A previous posting discussed the selection of sampling rates. Additional information can be found on the Vyatta web site.

The screen capture was generated using sFlowTrend to monitor the Vyatta router. Both the Vyatta router software and sFlowTrend can be downloaded at no charge, offering an inexpensive way to try out sFlow.

Making sure that all network devices (both physical and virtual) support sFlow provides the data center wide visibility needed for effective control of network resources. sFlow is already supported by most hardware vendors and Vyatta's support for sFlow extends visibility into the virtual network.