In this environment, software-based virtual switches are being installed on servers along with hypervisor, bridging traffic among different virtual machines (VMs).

KVM and Open vSwitch (OVS) are, respectively, the most popular open-source hypervisor and virtual switch used in todays data centers.

The steps below will build OVS user-space tools as well as its kernel module.

If you should see an empty list of VMs, that means KVM is set up successfully.

In this tutorial, I assume such a network interface is eth5.

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What you do realize however is that it becomes less than ideal when the network configuration is becoming complex.

For instance, imagine that youre using two bonded interfaces (LACP) that you then expose to a bridge, which you in turn want to configure a set of VLANs on top of.

That gets very messy using this method (and not to even mention the performance is poor in general).

Contrary to Bridge interfaces, Open vSwitch acts, as the name implies, as a proper virtual switch.

Also, kudos to SoulChild for a great write-up on the pfSense forum.

We will assume the following VLAN setup and that youve already configured this in the switch.

First, well create a bridge called ovsbridge using the following command.

If not, you may need to delete the bridge and add it again slightly differently (depending on your switch).

Once you start the VM, edit the VM definition using virsh edit.

Since we want to expose the VM to all our VLANs, we want to edit the network interface section to look something like this.

Its a big topic, so theres plenty to learn and this article by no means intends to cover it all.

I would also encourage you again to take a look at SoulChilds great write-up on the pfSense forum if youre having any issues.

While it doesnt support all OpenvSwitch features (such as trunking multiple VLANs on a single NIC to a VM), it is still worth it with the nice user interface and turn-key setup.

Install Open Vswitch On Ubuntu