Open vSwitch questions

[greavette]

Hello Proxmox,

Hopefully I've posted this in the correct forum.

I'm interested in better understanding Open vSwitch within our environment. I'm running a cluster of Proxmox Hosts and will be connecting them to Ceph. All Ceph and Proxmox servers will run Proxmox 4.1 and will be in the same cluster.

Open vSwitch sounds like it would make a lot of sense for us to use. We have Virtual Machines used as workstations. They are used to access an application to save data in a SQL Server database. The SQL Server Database runs in a VM on the same Proxmox cluster. The workstations are accessed via RDP from Thin Clients throughout the office.

In my current setup I have my SQL Server VM being accessed from each Workstation VM by going out to our managed switch and coming back into SQL. But if I understand things correctly, I basically I have VM's talking to a VM on the same cluster. From what I've read about Open vSwitch this would be a perfect opportunity to use Open vSwitch instead to have my Workstations connect directly to the SQL Server VM.

Onto my questions to help me understand:

• Would this make the connection to the database that much faster?
• Would using Open vSwitch reduce the traffic going in and out of my switch (not that I have to worry about that...our switch can handle the load and we are a very small office).
• What about using Open vSwitch in my Proxmox cluster. I'm guessing as long as each of my Proxmox Host Nodes have Open vSwitch enabled and configured, moving one of these virtual machines to another node will not affect the traffic over Open vSwitch.

Thanks in advance for any advice/tips you can provide.

 

[sdinet]

this is an epic question. why is it a bad thing to have VMs talking to each other? i dont really see what you are going for. maybe clarify?

 

[alexskysilk]

In my current setup I have my SQL Server VM being accessed from each Workstation VM by going out to our managed switch and coming back into SQL.

Your workstations are virtual as well as your servers? in that case, your traffic is NOT going out to your physical switches. its staying inside your virtual environment. Not only is it faster- there isnt a reason for the traffic to exit except if your source and destination are on different cluster nodes.

What about using Open vSwitch in my Proxmox cluster. I'm guessing as long as each of my Proxmox Host Nodes have Open vSwitch enabled and configured, moving one of these virtual machines to another node will not affect the traffic over Open vSwitch.

the question isn't whether you will be using a virtual switch, but in the context of proxmox its whether you'll be using openvswitch (ovs) or Linux bridging. Linux bridges are lighter weight (and therefore usually faster) and ovs has more features. Based on your described use case, you'll probably want linux bridges.