Comment 23 for bug 253230

I am replying here because I think this discussion is still adherent to the topic, and also because I don't mind spamming this bug report. It's been open for years and lead to nothing.

I am not here to say what is better between ovs, vde or any other similar tool. The super-partes role of a distribution must be to include every (popular) solution and this is the real advantage of free/OS. Ubuntu is just living on a different planet here.

For the sack of completeness, I must say vde has a kernelspace version as well, but it is less popular since vde is designed to run on other OSes too. I would be interested to benchmark the two tools anyway.

As a matter of fact, I don't see any counterpart for most of the vde tools in ovs, in particular most of the time I have to recreate complex network topologies, integrate emulated channels, use encrypted tunnels, connect local/remote real/virtual machines with maximum flexibility.

OVS is a VDE competitor as well as OpenVPN is, from my point of view. VDE is just a "broader" tool, and for me (and several other people) it is just nice to use the native integration with qemu and kvm, even if workarounds like bridging a kvm tap or even "capturing" it with vde_pcap are still possible nowadays with the lame official Ubuntu package.

My point is that OVS for sure does a great job, most likely from what you say it is even better than VDE for the features they have in common, but VDE is a set made of a larger number of tools for different purposes, that's why I am insisting that much here. Sorry if I was too direct in my previous reply: I am trying to explain why "use X instead of Y if Y is not supported in the distro" was not an acceptable answer.