To demonstrate VM to VM east-west traffic monitoring with OVS, originating traffic is transmitted in to the OVS, through two virtual machines and back to the origin.
A potential challenge in deploying a virtualized infrastructure is that traffic between virtual servers or service nodes isn’t amenable to the usual monitoring and troubleshooting techniques because it doesn’t traverse a physical link. While OVS definitely supports the virtual equivalent of a switch span port or network tap, enabling this on a software based OVS consumes valuable CPU cycles that could be used more profitably for applications.
By using OVS hardware offload on the SmartNIC, this monitoring is easily done with no loss of CPU cycles.
This example demonstrates VM to VM east-west traffic monitoring functionality with OVS. The following diagram is a schematic of the traffic flow.
