Open Vswitch is an Open Source software switch designed specifically to be used in virtualized environments such as OpenStack or RHEV-H.  OVS (Open Vswitch) was designed to make it easier to manage, configure, and monitor virtual traffic within a virtualized environment.

Below, is Part 1 in what I suspect will be a multiple part series on configuring, viewing, and managing your virtualized network via OVS.

Viewing OVS Bridges

To view OVS Bridges configured on a system, use the command ovs-vsctl as shown below. On my test system, we have three configured bridges; br-ex, br-int, and br-tun.

# ovs-vsctl show
b5aa3cf4-d962-4cb2-b3b6-20f0b4858f59
Bridge br-ex
Port br-ex
Interface br-ex
type: internal
Port “eth0”
Interface “eth0”
Port phy-br-ex
Interface phy-br-ex
type: patch
options: {peer=int-br-ex}

Bridge br-int
fail_mode: secure
Port int-br-ex
Interface int-br-ex
type: patch
options: {peer=phy-br-ex}
Port patch-tun
Interface patch-tun
type: patch
options: {peer=patch-int}
Port br-int
Interface br-int
type: internal

Bridge br-tun
fail_mode: secure
Port br-tun
Interface br-tun
type: internal
Port patch-int
Interface patch-int
type: patch
options: {peer=patch-tun}
ovs_version: “2.4.0”

The output from the command above is rather verbose. If you prefer a more terse output you best try the command below. In this instance the only output is the name of our bridges.

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