By now, you should have a fair idea about how ODL can manage virtual switches especially Open vSwitch. Now let's take a brief look at how ODL and OpenStack work together to provide powerful SDN capabilities for cloud operators.
OVS is the most popular virtual switch used in OpenStack-based clouds. OVS is used inside OpenStack compute nodes to provide virtual network connectivity to VM instances. However, cloud infrastructure is highly elastic in nature, it can be scaled up or down on demand. This means that the step of associating an OVS to ODL cannot be done manually. It needs to be automated.
In addition, in OpenStack-based clouds, different tenants share the same OVS virtual switch but their data traffic needs to be isolated. One of the main drivers for isolation is that different tenants may be using overlapping IP addresses in their network. This multi-tenancy requirement makes it harder to configure each OVS instance manually. Therefore, all the operations on OVS must...