Earlier this year at Citrix's annual conference for end users (Synergy), they announced the availability of an open source switch that may compete with the Nexus 1000V the Cisco made available for vSphere.
There is now an official website about the Project, and is called Open vSwitch. The vSwitch is to be released under the Apache 2 open source license.
The first release which is available online is designed to support distributed networking (like the Cisco Nexus 1000V) and includes the following features:
- Visibility into inter-VM communication via NetFlow, SPAN, and RSPAN Standard 802.1Q VLAN model with trunking Per VM policing NIC bonding with source-MAC load balancing Kernel-based forwarding Support for OpenFlow Compatibility layer for the Linux bridging code
On top of that the following features are part of the roadmap:
- User-space forwarding engine
- sFlow
- Compatibility layer for VDE
- Ethernet over GRE (for ERSPAN and virtual private network creation) Full L3 support + NAT Priority-based QoS More management interfaces (IOS-like CLI, SNMP, NetFlow) 802.1x/RADIUS
- Support for hardware acceleration (VMDQ, switching chips on SR-IOV NICs)