OVS… its simple really!

It’s taken me almost a week to figure out how they expect the OVS networking to work, and no one explains its simple.  So heres a 30 second explanation that will actually make sense.

You have 3 openvswitch bridges,  br-int, br-ex and br-tun.

The VM all get ports on br-int, br-ex is used for actual network traffic and br-tun is used for the tunnel interfaces between instances.

OpenVSwitch creates flow rules with virtual patch cables between br-ex and br-int to provide connectivity.

Add your physical interfaces to br-ex, create a management port with type internal so linux can add ips to it.  In the below example we use load balancing to combine 2 nics for redundancy.

Commands to build this configuration:

What it should look like:

[root@s2138 ~]# ovs-vsctl show

0646ec2b-3bd3-4bdb-b805-2339a03ad286

    Bridge br-ex

        Port br-ex

            Interface br-ex

                type: internal

        Port mgmt

            tag: 15

            Interface mgmt

                type: internal

        Port “bond0”

            Interface “em1”

            Interface “em2”

    Bridge br-int

        fail_mode: secure

        Port br-int

            Interface br-int

                type: internal

    Bridge br-tun

        Port br-tun

            Interface br-tun

                type: internal