Routing Open vSwitch into the mainline

The December 1st issue of LWN.net kernel development news includes the article Routing Open vSwitch into the mainline describing the Open vSwitch and reporting that "Open vSwitch was pulled into the networking tree on December 3; expect it in the 3.3 kernel."

This is exciting news! The inclusion of Open vSwitch support in the mainline Linux kernel integrates the advanced network visibility and control capabilities (through support of sFlow and OpenFlow) needed for virtualizing networking in cloud environments. Open vSwitch is already the default switch in the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) and Citrix XenServer 6 and inclusion within the Linux kernel will help to further unify networking across open source virtualization systems, including: Xen, KVM, Proxmox VE and VirtualBox. In addition, integrated sFlow and OpenFlow support has also been demonstrated for the upcoming Windows 8 version of Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform and sFlow and OpenFlow are also widely supported by network equipment vendors.

Broad support for open standards like sFlow and OpenFlow is critical, integrating the visibility and control capabilities within physical and virtual network elements that allows orchestration systems such as OpenStack, openQRM, and OpenNebula to automate and optimize management of network and server resources in cloud data centers.