OVS the right solution ?

[svenvg93]

I’m thinking of moving from esxi to proxmox for my homelab.
Only I cannot seem to find an answer on one question.

With ovs can i use it as “internal” switch? So assign one physical port to it and connect all my vms to it. With different vlans.
A little the same as you can with vSwitch in esxi.

 

[t.lamprecht]

Hi.

Linux Bridges with VLANs could be one solution, but I guess what you actually would like is the experimental SDN implementation, which is new since Proxmox VE 6.2.

While still under development it has a integration in the webinterface already. See the docs:
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvesdn.html

And the Forum Discussion thread:
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-6-2-sdn-beta-test.69655/

While not marked as stable some tester already gave some positive feedback and the main author is quick to address real issues, so for a homelab maybe worth a try..

 

[t.lamprecht]

Oh, and OVS would work too - naturally. The SDN profits from it's more in-depth integration (and has some compatibility with OVS).

 

[svenvg93]

Thnx I will check it out!

 

[spirit]

ovs or linux bridge this is almost the same.

vmware "vswitch", are some kind of abstraction, because you never have 1big switch (1control plane until you use nsx).
So even vmware, have multiple local switch on each hypervisor.
But it's simply define once at cluster level, then push on each node.

Proxmox implementation, was to define manually switch (ovs or bridge), on each node, then define vlan on each nic vm.

The new sdn feature, is something like vmware, where you define switch/vlan globally at datacenter level once, then proxmox push them locally on each server.

 

[mdenadal]

Hi,
in production we use extensively OVS mainly for the balance slb feature.
Is somehow possible to use linux bridges to bond interface obtaining fault tolerance AND load balancing using unmanaged switches (no LACP) ?
I know that LACP is definetely a best practice, sadly often it's not possible (eg. network guys with complex personalities )

 

[Rares]

in production we use extensively OVS mainly for the balance slb feature.

What extra system load did you observe due to the use of OVS vs. native sistem?

 

[mdenadal]

What extra system load did you observe due to the use of OVS vs. native sistem?

Negligible.
To be honest our customers tipically run storage critical loads more than network intensive.
The most common setup are a couple of 10 GbE OVS bonded with balance SLB and some VLANs.
On a fair number of VMs load balancing is quite good.