CentOS 7 – Installing Openvswitch 2.3.1 LTS

Openvswitch 2.3.1 was released on December 2014 and this post explains how to quickly generate an RPM to install Openvswitch command-line tools. I’ll be using the Openvswitch’s kernel module that comes with CentOS kernel so no kernel module is compiled.

As the root user let’s install some packages and add a new user:

yum -y install wget openssl-devel gcc make python-devel openssl-devel kernel-devel graphviz kernel-debug-devel autoconf automake rpm-build redhat-rpm-config libtool

adduser ovs

su - ovs

Now as the ovs user we’ll generate the rpm file. In this post I’m skipping the rpmbuild tests included with openvswitch as I’m solving some dependency problems.

mkdir -p ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES

wget http://openvswitch.org/releases/openvswitch-2.3.1.tar.gz

cp openvswitch-2.3.1.tar.gz ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/

tar xfz openvswitch-2.3.1.tar.gz

sed 's/openvswitch-kmod, //g' openvswitch-2.3.1/rhel/openvswitch.spec > openvswitch-2.3.1/rhel/openvswitch_no_kmod.spec

rpmbuild -bb --nocheck ~/openvswitch-2.3.1/rhel/openvswitch_no_kmod.spec

exit

Finally we install the rpm package:

 yum localinstall /home/ovs/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/openvswitch-2.3.1-1.x86_64.rpm

Let’s check that the command-line tools are ready:

ovs-vsctl -V
ovs-vsctl (Open vSwitch) 2.3.1
Compiled Jan 25 2015 02:13:00
DB Schema 7.6.2

UPDATE: If you’re using SELinux in enfocing mode, if you try to start the service (systemctl start openvswitch.service) you’ll find some errors: install: cannot change owner and permissions of ‘/etc/openvswitch’: No such file or directory andCreating empty database /etc/openvswitch/conf.db ovsdb-tool: I/O error: /etc/openvswitch/conf.db: failed to lock lockfile (No such file or directory). This is how I solved them (the commands are executed as root):

yum install policycoreutils-python
mkdir /etc/openvswitch
semanage fcontext -a -t openvswitch_rw_t "/etc/openvswitch(/.*)?"
restorecon -Rv /etc/openvswitch

UPDATE: If you run the ovs-vsctl show command and you receive the following error, please check that your openvswitch service has been started (use systemctl start openvswitch.service)

• ovs-vsctl: unix:/var/run/openvswitch/db.sock: database connection failed (No such file or directory)

Done!