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title: Open vSwitch
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    <h1 style="display:inline-block;">Production Quality, Multilayer Open Virtual Switch</h1>
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        <h2><strong>What is Open vSwitch?</strong></h2>
        <p>Open vSwitch is a production quality, multilayer virtual switch licensed under the open source <a href="http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html">Apache 2.0</a> license.&nbsp; It is designed to enable massive network automation through programmatic extension, while still supporting standard management interfaces and protocols (e.g. NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, RSPAN,&nbsp;CLI, LACP, 802.1ag).&nbsp; In addition, it is designed to support distribution across multiple physical servers similar to VMware's vNetwork distributed vswitch or Cisco's Nexus 1000V. See full feature list <a href="{{site.url}}/features">here</a></p>
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                <p>Download</p>
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            Introducing Open vSwitch
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            <p>To understand why virtualized environments require a new approach to switching, read the <a href="{{site.gitfileviewerurl}}WHY-OVS.md">WHY-OVS</a> document that is distributed with the source code.</p>
            <p>Open vSwitch is used in multiple products and runs in many large production environments (some very, very large). Each stable release is run through a regression suite of hundreds of system-level tests and over a thousand unit tests.</p>
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            Open vSwitch 2015 Fall Conference
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	    <a href="support/ovscon2015/">Tentative schedule</a> for this
	    year's conference, to be held Nov. 16-17, 2015, in San Jose, CA.
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            Patchwork for Open vSwitch
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	    <a href="https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/openvswitch/list/">Patchwork
	    </a>is a web-based patch tracking system for facilitating the contribution
	    and management of contributions to Open vSwitch project.
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            Join Open vSwitch Community
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            Supported Platform
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            <p>Open vSwitch can operate both as a soft switch running within the hypervisor, and as the control stack for switching silicon. It has been ported to multiple virtualization platforms and switching chipsets. It is the default switch in <a href="http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX130418">XenServer 6.0</a>, the <a href="http://xen.org/products/cloudxen.html">Xen Cloud Platform</a> and also supports <a href="http://www.xen.org">Xen</a>, <a href="http://www.linux-kvm.org">KVM</a>, <a href="http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Main_Page"> Proxmox VE </a> and <a href="http://www.virtualbox.org/">VirtualBox</a>. It has also been integrated into many virtual management systems including <a href="http://www.openstack.org/">OpenStack</a>, <a href="http://www.openqrm.com/">openQRM</a>, <a href="http://opennebula.org/">OpenNebula</a> and <a href="http://ovirt.org/">oVirt</a>. The kernel datapath is distributed with <a href="http://kernel.org/">Linux</a>,  and packages are available for <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/">Ubuntu</a>, <a href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, and <a href="http://fedoraproject.org//">Fedora</a>. Open vSwitch is also supported on <a href="http://freebsd.org">FreeBSD</a> and <a href="http://netbsd.org">NetBSD</a>.  The Open vSwitch release in development has been ported to <a href="http://dpdk.org">DPDK</a>.<br><br></p>

            <p>The bulk of the code is written in platform-independent C and is easily ported to other environments.</p>
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