IVS leverages the Indigo2 framework and implements forwarding using the openvswitch kernel module.
IVS is a pure OpenFlow vSwitch. Focusing on OpenFlow allows us tosimplify management and increase performance. For example, IVS does not include a database. IVS does include scalable GRE tunnels and multi-core upcall processing, both important for large deployments.
We created IVS because the available open-source virtual switches did not meet the needs of large-scale deployments and were held hostage by incumbent vendors, preventing community-based innovation. And we didn't need the overhead of traditional networking stacks. We wanted a thin, lightweight OpenFlow speaker that just worked, and scaled up with low latency and multi-threading.