A daemon that manages and controls any number of Open vSwitch
switches on the local machine.
The database argument specifies how ovs-vswitchd connects to
ovsdb-server. database may be an OVSDB active or passive
connection method, as described in ovsdb(7). The default is
unix:/usr/local/var/run/openvswitch/db.sock.
ovs-vswitchd retrieves its configuration from database at
startup. It sets up Open vSwitch datapaths and then operates
switching across each bridge described in its configuration
files. As the database changes, ovs-vswitchd automatically
updates its configuration to match.
ovs-vswitchd switches may be configured with any of the following
features:
• L2 switching with MAC learning.
• NIC bonding with automatic fail-over and source MAC-based
TX load balancing ("SLB").
• 802.1Q VLAN support.
• Port mirroring, with optional VLAN tagging.
• NetFlow v5 flow logging.
• sFlow(R) monitoring.
• Connectivity to an external OpenFlow controller, such as
NOX.
Only a single instance of ovs-vswitchd is intended to run at a
time. A single ovs-vswitchd can manage any number of switch
instances, up to the maximum number of supported Open vSwitch
datapaths.
ovs-vswitchd does all the necessary management of Open vSwitch
datapaths itself. Thus, ovs-dpctl(8) (and its userspace datapath
counterparts accessible via ovs-appctl dpctl/command) are not
needed with ovs-vswitchd and should not be used because they can
interfere with its operation. These tools are still useful for
diagnostics.
An Open vSwitch datapath kernel module must be loaded for
ovs-vswitchd to be useful. Refer to the documentation for
instructions on how to build and load the Open vSwitch kernel
module.
