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VDEv2: Virtual Distributed Ethernet
- skowalak 2y agoNotice: Virtual Distributed Ethernet is not related in any way with www.vde.com ("Verband der Elektrotechnik, Elektronik und Informationstechnik" i.e. the German "Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies"). I wonder how many times that came up, that they had to put it in the README.
- fl7305 2y agoIn Germany, very often. VDE is like ANSI or IEEE there. If you ever work on anything electrical in Germany, you see the acronym VDE everywhere on standards etc.
- DrMiaow 2y agoI CE.
- OJFord 2y agoAnd in the rest of the world, screwdrivers. Why is it that we all use VDE ratings for high voltage insulated screwdrivers, but (as far as I'm aware/can think of) nothing else?! I suppose DIN is similar: to most people it's just the rail. (Not to mention I wouldn't be surprised if the common one is just one of many DIN rail specifications or size variants.)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- transfire 2y agoWhat is this good for?
- zamadatix 2y agoLooks like it was an option in QEMU prior to options like OVS. Not sure what one would prefer it for now though.
- sparcpile 2y agoI use it all the time for my QEMU VMs. It’s less hassle than OVS and allows you to configure some complex networks with just a few socket files and tunnels. I use one VDE switch per network with each network having a single tap interface to my OS bridges. It has been a feature of QEMU since 0.15 and the performance is just as good as taps or OVS.
- duskwuff 2y ago> Not sure what one would prefer it for now though. VDE can be used with wirefilter to introduce programmable, non-ideal characteristics (latency, packet loss, data corruption, etc) into a network link. Obviously you wouldn't want this in a production system, but it's useful for testing.
- dgl 2y agoMostly historical interest; User Mode Linux (UML) was one of the first more performant options for virtualisation of Linux. This let you play with a network lab based on UML or other technologies without needing to set up a physical network. This was before hardware virtualisation that we now take for granted. UML was actually the first technology that Linode used for virtualisation, then Xen came along and was a far better option.
- XorNot 2y agoI wrote a docker network plugin once which interfaced with a VDE virtual switch. The benefit was that the switch was user space and pipes based, so technically you could wire more things into it (like packet droppers) without messing with your hosts networking stack. The motivation was I wanted to use more easily customized dockerized services to test bare-metal system images boot process - which required a bunch of stuff (like DHCP, config management etc.) to be "available" on the network but more easily swapped out. This actually worked great! You could use QEMU to spin up a machine, have a DHCP container assign it an ethernet address but then reserve an IP range on the docker network for docker to launch containers into. It also meant you could bridge into the virtual network easily and without any host IP stack interactions - just launch an interactive container onto the network (or launch it with two interfaces, one on the "real" network so you could provide internet connectivity). I wanted to get around to testing failure states, but it never ultimately came up.
- miffe 2y agoI wish this had a way to hook up to a Hyper-V Virtual Switch. That way I could get 86box on a the network reliably, SLiRP and PCap works badly imho. Anyone knows where the API docs for hyper-v virtual switch is?
- ComputerGuru 2y agoESXi has great virtual switch support, more extensible, adaptable, and scriptable than Hyper-V so far as I’ve seen.
- sureglymop 2y agoI'd also recommend KVM/Libvirt and OpenVSwitch. Especially it combined with Netplan it becomes trivial to set up and use.
- zokier 2y agoOVS seems great but it doesn't seem to garner much hype these days. Does it carry too much connotations from OpenStack, or why isn't it the defacto solution for all L2 bridging/virtual networking for containers/VMs/routers/etc?
- zamadatix 2y agoMost people just need data to come out the NICs on certain tags. If you need L2 between guests (in a way you can't just do that from the network in the first place) you can either just do it in container or on the host without having to set up an entire virtual switch. The configuration manages fine outside an OpenStack environment it's just a ton of work for very little squeeze.
- 1oooqooq 2y agothe vm & container network space is a mess. slirp/slirp4net is not worked on for a while. I think all the effort now goes to the worse name project in history: pasta.
- 2y ago
- tabulatouch 2y agoRenzo Davoli was my professor at the University of Bologna, Computer Science. A real nerd that shaped my systems thinking!
- generalizations 2y agoWhat does the throughput look like with VDE? Seems like that's rarely talked about in network virtualization, but it seems kinda important.