Using OpenSwitch Appliance With GNS3

Note: This article was originally published here.
Update:This post has been updated to account for some recent changes in the appliance configuration (support for up to 7 front ports). In my previous post I described my developer setup to work with OpenSwitch. At the end of my post I showed how to download the build system, and configure and build an ‘appliance’ image.
What Is An OpenSwitch Appliance?
The appliance is a virtual machine image (in OVA format) that could be run on VirtualBox or VMware (on this articule I will focus on VirtualBox) and provides a software datapath (based in OVS right now, but P4 support it’s landing soon). All the rest of the OpenSwitch stack is the same that you will see in a real hardware, and obviously the software datapath has certain limitations and features not implemented.
Despite his limitations, the appliance is a really nice way to get your hands into OpenSwitch without having real hardware.
If you are using the development environment, you can find the appliance .ova file on the images directory after completing the build, but otherwise you can also download a periodic image from the project archives (keep in mind Continue reading
Kyrio hopes to attract telcos and other non-cable industry players.
A mere 78 lines of code that even a manager can understand.
Telcos looking at virtualization can look to where it's been done before.