Skip to content

Welcome to the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) SIG

This site contains general information about the NFV SIG

The CentOS NFV SIG provides a CentOS-based stack that will serve as a platform for the deployment and testing of virtual network functions (VNFs) and NFV component packages on compliant CentOS platform.

Currently, the main goal is to provide RPM packages of OpenvSwitch and Open Virtual Network software for CentOS Stream that can be used by other projects as oVirt, OpenStack or OpenShift.

The content provided by this SIG is aligned with the packages provided by Red Hat Fast Datapath, where Red Hat includes support for accelerated and non-accelerated data paths such as SR-IOV, OVS (kernel), DPDK, OVS-DPDK, OVS Offload and others. For more information about it, see this Red Hat article (requires login).

Packages and CentOs Stream versions matrix

The following table shows the versions of OpenvSwitch and OVN included for the different CentOS Stream versions and which ones are tested together.

CentOS OpenvSwitch Open Virtual Network
CentOS Stream 8 2.13 2.13
CentOS Stream 8 2.15 2021
CentOS Stream 8 2.16
CentOS Stream 8 2.17 2022
CentOS Stream 9 2.16
CentOS Stream 9 2.17 2022

In addition of these packages, the package openvswitch-selinux-extra-policy is provided by NFV SIG as a requirement to run openvswitch/ovn with Selinux enabled.

Packages are provided for x86_64, aarch64 an ppc64le architectures.

Installing OpenvSwitch and OVN

1. Install NFV SIG openvswitch repository

# sudo dnf install centos-release-nfv-openvswitch -y

2. Install the openvswitch package for the desired version

In order to allow the installation of the different versions of openvswitch and ovn from a single repository the name of the package is different for each version, composed of the name (openvswitch or ovn) and the version, as in openvswitch2.17, openvswitch2.15 or ovn2.13, ovn-2021 or ovn22.09. You can list the full list of versions on NFV SIG repositoris by executing the command:

# dnf list "openvswitch*" "ovn*"

Once you have the list of the desired versions, you can install them with the usual dnf command:

# sudo dnf install openvswitch2.17 ovn22.09

Considerations about upgrades

The update from a version of OpenvSwitch or OVN to a newer major one (i.e. from 2.15 to 2.17 or from 2021 to 2022) requires uninstalling the previous one. This can be done in a single command with –allowerasing option.

Thus, updating from a running openvswitch2.15 to openvswitch2.17:

# sudo dnf install openvswitch2.17 --allowerasing

and you will need to enable and start the openvswitch systemd service.

Alternatively, you can also uninstall the old version and install the desired one. Note that the OpenvSwitch database will stay untouched so the new version will be able to handle the existing bridges, ports and flows.

NFV SIGs members

Current members:

  • Alan Pevec
  • Alfredo Moralejo
  • Eitan Raviv
  • Joel Capitao
  • Michael Santana
  • Thomas F Herbert
  • Yatin Karel

Current SIG chair is Alfredo Moralejo

IRC Meetings

  • Monthly, in the first Wednesday of the month
  • Time: 15:00 UTC (date -d “1500 UTC”)
  • Where: IRC- Libera.chat - #centos-meeting

Contact points

© Red Hat