Nicira FOSS alternatives

[Robert Kukura]

On 02/06/2012 08:16 PM, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On 02/06/2012 05:07 PM, Renich Bon Ciric wrote:
>> http://nicira.com/
>>
>> Hello, guys!
>>
>> Does anybody know about FOSS alternatives to this "virtual
>> networking" layer these guys are proposing?
>
> Isn't http://wiki.openstack.org/Quantum relevant? IIRC, it was a
> Nicira employee who wrote/leads Quantum to 'provide "network
> connectivity as a service" between interface devices (e.g., vNICs)'. I
> wonder if that's at the core of their product now?
>
> Dan Wendlandt of Nicira presented this at the oVirt workshop last
> November:
>
> http://www.ovirt.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Quantum_Ovirt_discussion.pdf
>
> - - Karsten

OpenStack Quantum currently has basic "virtual networking" capabilities. 
Its Open vSwitch plugin and agent map tenant networks to VLANs at the 
compute nodes, but depend on standard VLAN layer 2 switching to move 
data between compute nodes (and services such as VPNs, firewalls, etc.).

I believe Nicira's product avoids the limitations of VLANs (i.e. only 
~4K VLAN tags) and provides additional capabilities.

An open source project that also plugs into Quantum and may be worth 
investigating is http://www.osrg.net/ryu/overview.html.

-Bob