EVS has the following components:
EVS manager
EVS controller
EVS clients
EVS nodes
The following figure shows the components of EVS.
Figure 18 EVS Components
In this figure, the EVS manager and the EVS controller are two separate hosts. The EVS nodes EVS-Node1, EVS-Node2, and EVS-Node3 are three hosts whose VNICs or zone's VNIC anet resources connect to an elastic virtual switch.
The EVS manager is the entity that communicates with the EVS controller to define the L2 network topologies and the IP addresses for these L2 networks. The EVS manager communicates with the EVS controller through the evsadm command. The EVS manager and the EVS controller can also be on the same compute node.
The EVS controller provides functionality for the configuration and administration of an elastic virtual switch and its associated resources associated. You must set up only one physical machine as the EVS controller in a data center or multitenant cloud environment.
To implement the L2 segments across physical machines, you would 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.
The following table lists the EVS controller properties.
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Controller properties are applicable to the entire data center or multitenant cloud environment. However, you can override the values of the controller properties uplink-port and vxlan-addr by specifying the host to which those property settings should apply. For example, the following syntax sets the uplink port net1 as applicable only to host1:
$ evsadm set-controlprop -h host1 -p uplink-port=net1
EVS clients are systems that are serviced by the EVS controller.
Clients can be physical systems or virtual machines (VMs), which in Oracle Solaris, are synonymous with non-global zones. The typical commands for configuring EVS clients are dladm, evsadm and zonecfg.
When VNICs are created for the elastic virtual switch, the configuration information for VNICs is retrieved from the EVS controller.
A connection between the elastic virtual switch and a VNIC constitutes a node. EVS clients are EVS nodes if their VNICs are configured and connected to the switch. You can use commands such as dladm and zonecfg to specify VNICs that need to be connected to an elastic virtual switch. For more information, see Configuring EVS Nodes.
If you deploy an EVS on your site, some restrictions are apply when you administer the following components on the switch:
VNICs – When these are connected to the switch, then you cannot modify them, change their names, or change their properties.
VXLANs – When you implement VXLANs on elastic virtual switches, VXLAN datalinks are automatically created on the EVS nodes that hosts VNICs for the EVS. These datalinks are identified as evs-vxlansegment-ID, such as evs-vxlan200, to indicate that EVS was the creator of the datalink.
You cannot rename or delete these type of datalinks. However, you can temporarily set their properties by using the appropriate dladm command options.