Open vSwitch is an open source virtual switch for network automation.

August 9, 2016

2 Min Read

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration today is announcing that Open vSwitch (OVS) is now a Linux Foundation Project. Open vSwitch is an open source virtual switch designed to enable network automation while supporting standard management interfaces and protocols.

In modern data centers, networking functions are increasingly performed by software running on servers, either as part of the application or within a hypervisor. While the traditional Layer-2 Linux bridge addresses many common networking tasks, Open vSwitch was created with a robust set of features and a high performance design to address the rapidly growing needs of SDN and virtual networking use cases.

Today, OVS is used within multiple commercial products as well as large production environments. OVS has been ported to multiple virtualization platforms, switching chipsets, and networking hardware accelerators. OVS works on a wide variety of systems, including Linux, DPDK, Hyper-V, and FreeBSD. It is used in a variety of SDN applications, including NFV and network virtualization; it is the most widely used networking back-end in OpenStack.

“OVS is a great example of how open source software has enabled the networking industry to match the pace of cloud computing and help advance virtualized technologies,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “Hosting OVS as a Linux Foundation Project will serve to further collaboration across users and vendors and aid in open technology development throughout the networking stack.”

Contributions to OVS span more than 300 individuals across companies including Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and VMware. The governance is managed by a group of the top committers to the project with a variety of backgrounds and affiliations.

As a project hosted at The Linux Foundation, Open vSwitch will continue its operations under an open governance model and continue accepting contributions from all interested companies and developers.

Linux Foundation

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