Open vSwitch: Virtual Networking with Ben Pfaff

Virtual machines are operating system instances that run alongside each other on the same physical host. The virtual machines running on a physical host are managed by a hypervisor running on the physical host. A cluster of two physical servers could have four virtual machines running across those two physical instances. Those four virtual machines can communicate over a virtual switch. A network switch allows packets of bytes to be routed between machines. With a physical network switch, a dedicated physical device sits in the computer network to do this routing. A virtual network switch provides this packet routing without needing a dedicated physical hardware device for routing. Open vSwitch is a distributed virtual multilayer switch. Open vSwitch provides network switching for hardware virtualization environments. Ben Pfaff is a core contributor to Open vSwitch, and he joins the show to talk about operating system virtualization. Ben was an early employee at Nicira, a company that made significant developments in software-defined networking before being acquired by VMware in 2012.