OVS in Production, with Chad Norgan from Rackspace - a podcast by Ben Pfaff

from 2016-05-08T21:25:52

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Interview with Chad Norgan of Rackspace, about use of Open vSwitch at
Rackspace over the years.

Topics include:

  • Chad's role at Rackspace and what he spends his time on.
  • Shifts in where he spends his time as Open vSwitch has matured.
  • Experiments with buying and writing SDN controllers and OpenFlow flows
    at Rackspace, including a Ryu-based chassis controller.
  • SDN in two generations of Rackspace cloud, with NVP in the second
    generation.
  • Tracing datapath flows using tools in Open vSwitch, using
    “ovs-appctl ofproto/trace”, and the value of tracing for
    debugging a running system.
  • Suggestions for improving “ovs-appctl ofproto/trace”.
  • Usefulness of Open vSwitch logging.
  • Significant performance improvements since earlier versions, such as
    moving logging out of the main thread, megaflows, and evictionhandling.
  • Potential appliance use of DPDK, contrasted against downside for
    hypervisors of losing a core.
  • Thoughts about importance of 64-byte packet performance in Rackspace
    environment, and potential of eBPF work going on at Cisco to help withthat.
  • Performance history of Open vSwitch versions as perceived by Nicira and
    Rackspace, and its evolution over time as Open vSwitch was exposed tomore and more diverse production use cases.
  • Open vSwitch decision for version 1.11 to completely rewrite everything
    in terms of megaflows, to achieve reasonable performance in importantminority of cases.
  • Chad's presentation on Open vSwitch performance at theOpen vSwitch 2014
    Fall Conference    .
  • Open vSwitch as the “incumbent” virtual switch.
  • Generating good representative traffic for testing.
  • Ixia hardware for predictable traffic generation, removing a variable
    from the testing equation.
  • Desire for a physical hardware switch with the flexibility of Open
    vSwitch, with P4 switches as a possible route there.
  • “ovsdb-tool -mmm show-log” as database debugging tool.

Chad can be contacted at@chadnorganon Twitter, as
BeardyMcBeard on thefreenodeIRC
network

OVS Orbit is produced byBen Pfaff. The
intro and bumper music isElectro
Deluxe, featuring Gurdonack, copyright 2014 by My Free Mickey. The
outro music isGirls like
you, featuring Thespinwires, copyright 2014 by Stefan Kartenberg.
All content is licensed under a Creative CommonsAttribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0)license.

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