I am taking a look at using OVS to load balance traffic over a number of ports. I was initially thinking of implementing the application by using group tables with type=select but the fact that the current OVS code uses dl_dst as the basis of the hash complicates the implementation. This is especially an issue especially if trying to divide traffic by flows.
I could see that for TCP and UDP flows using a hash based on nw_src/nw_dst/tp_src/tp_dst/proto_type (or a more complex tuple) could be useful for load balancing. Is there any reason why this couldn't be added or is there a simpler solution to allow for load balancing, using group tables or not, that I am missing. If not I was thinking of coding up a patch that would replace the current dl_dst hash with a function that chose the tuple based on type of traffic. If the flow is a TCP or UDP one the new function would hash based on the 5-tuple. Other traffic would just use the dl_dst based hash. Also is there any plans to add some way to toggle what type of hashes could be used for the select group tables. The OF spec specifically says you can't specify the hashing mechanism for select groups through the OF protocol itself but it still may be useful to allow for setting how you wanted to created for load balancing or ECMP through another mechanism. Thanks, Chris Small Network Engineer University of Washington _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@openvswitch.org http://openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
