EVS Controller

The EVS controller provides functionality for the configuration and administration of an elastic virtual switch and all the resources associated with it. You must set up only one physical machine as the EVS controller in a data center.

You specify the EVS controller by using the controller property with the evsadm set-prop command. The controller property is saved in the svc:/network/evs:default SMF service and therefore is persistent across system boots.

The EVS controller is associated with properties that you can configure by using the evsadm set-controlprop command. To implement the L2 segments across physical machines, you need to configure the properties of an EVS controller with information such as available VLAN IDs, available VXLAN segment IDs, or an uplink port for each EVS node. For more information about how to configure the EVS controller and set properties for it, see Creating and Administering an EVS Controller.

The following table shows the properties that you can configure for the EVS controller.

Table 5-2  EVS Controller Properties

EVS Controller Property Description Possible Values Default Value l2-type Defines how an elastic virtual switch is implemented across physical machines. Note -  When you change the l2-type property, the elastic virtual switches that are created prior to change are not affected. Only the elastic virtual switches that are created after the change have the updated l2-type property. This behavior means that L2 segments based on VLAN and VXLAN can coexist in an EVS controller. vlan or vxlan vlan vlan-range A comma-separated list of VLAN ID ranges that are used for creating an elastic virtual switch. One VLAN ID is associated with each elastic virtual switch. 1 - 4094 -- vxlan-range A comma-separated list of VXLAN segment number ranges that are used for creating an elastic virtual switch. One VXLAN segment number is associated with each elastic virtual switch. 0 - 16777215 -- vxlan-addr Specifies the IP address over which the VXLAN datalink must be created. You can also set the vxlan-addr property to a subnet. -- -- vxlan-mgroup Specifies the multicast address that you need to use while creating the VXLAN datalinks. -- If you do not specify the multicast address, the VXLAN datalink uses the All Host address. vxlan-ipvers Specifies the IP version of the address that you need to use for the IP interface that hosts VXLAN datalinks. v4 or v6 v4 uplink-port Specifies the datalink that you need to use for VLANs or VXLANs. -- --

The controller properties that you set for an EVS controller are applicable to the entire data center. However, you can override the values of the controller properties uplink-port and vxlan-addr on a per-host basis.

For example, suppose that when you set the controller properties, you set the uplink-port property to the datalink net2, which is used to create VNICs or VXLANs on every EVS node in the data center. However, if an EVS node in the data center has the datalink net1 as the only interface, you would need to override the global value net2 with a per-host value as follows:

# evsadm set-controlprop -h host1 -p uplink-port=net1

For more information, see How to Configure an EVS Controller.

If you do not specify a value for a controller property, the property is reset to the default value, as shown in Example 6–2. For more information about the EVS controller properties, see the evsadm(1M) man page.