The current stablerelease of Open vSwitch (version 1.4.1) supports the following features:
- Visibility into inter-VM communication via NetFlow, sFlow(R), SPAN, RSPAN, and GRE-tunneled mirrors
- LACP (IEEE 802.1AX-2008)
- Standard 802.1Q VLAN model with trunking
- A subset of 802.1ag CCM link monitoring
- STP (IEEE 802.1D-1998)
- Fine-grained min/max rate QoS
- Support for HFSC qdisc
- Per VM interface traffic policing
- NIC bonding with source-MAC load balancing, active backup, and L4 hashing
- OpenFlow protocol support (including many extensions for virtualization)
- IPv6 support
- Multiple tunneling protocols (Ethernet over GRE, CAPWAP, IPsec, GRE over IPsec)
- Remote configuration protocol with local python bindings
- Compatibility layer for the Linux bridging code
- Kernel and user-space forwarding engine options
- Multi-table forwarding pipeline with flow-caching engine
- Forwarding layer abstraction to ease porting to new software and hardware platforms