Porting OVS to Hyper-V, with Alessandro Pilotti from Cloudbase

OVS Orbit

An interview with Alessandro Pilotti of Cloudbase, which Alessandro describes as the company that takes care of everything related to Microsoft technologies in OpenStack. The interview focuses on the Open vSwitch port to Hyper-V, to which Cloudbase is a top contributor.

Highlights and topics in this episode include:

• An overview of what Cloudbase does and what it works on in OpenStack.
• Why Cloudbase started their Open vSwitch port to Hyper-V.
• History of the VMware and Cloudbase ports to Hyper-V and how they were merged into upstream Open vSwitch.
• Alessandro's thoughts on how to favoring a user experience familiar to Windows admins versus one familiar to user who know Open vSwitch from other platforms.
• Perspectives on collaboration in the Hyper-V port development.
• The native Hyper-V switch versus Open vSwitch.
• Ben's anecdote about a surprising conference call with Microsoft back in 2011.
• Alessandro educates Ben about Ubuntu on Windows
• How port names are handled in Windows.
• Status of the Hyper-V port and how it's being used
• Upcoming features for the Hyper-V port, such as connection tracking bsed firewalling ("conntrack").
• OVN on Hyper-V.
• Alessandro's role as CEO at Cloudbase and how he gets involved in the technical side of projects.
• How Cloudbase attracts employees, via internships from local universities.
• Continuous integration for OpenStack on Hyper-V.
• Special challenges of projects with a kernel component.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The intro and bumper music is Electro Deluxe, featuring Gurdonack, copyright 2014 by My Free Mickey. The outro music is Girls like you, featuring Thespinwires, copyright 2014 by Stefan Kartenberg. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.