The people who brought you Open vSwitch (OVS) are taking a shot at putting network abstractions on top of those virtual switches.

The Open Virtual Network (OVN) effort aims to provide OVS with “native support for virtual network abstractions, such as virtual Layer 2 and Layer 3 overlays and security groups,” according to the authors of today's Network Heresy blog posting announcing the project.

The result would be the ability to connect groups of virtual machines — or Linux containers, as the post goes out of its way to mention — into private Layer 2 or Layer 3 networks.

It amounts to adding a control plane to OVS. But the blog post stresses that OVN is not meant to replace full-fledged software-defined networking (SDN) efforts. OVN, which resides in the hypervisor, sitting above OVS, targets Layer 2-3 virtual networking only.

OVN will support established protocols including OpenFlow and OVSDB. The latter is an instrumental ingredient to VMware's NSX offering for network virtualization — and VMware, of course, has been the de facto host of the OVS project since acquiring Nicira, where OVS got its start.

OVN isn't entirely a VMware show, though. The Network Heresy post's writers include Chris Wright from Red Hat and Madhu Venugopal, a former Red Hat employee who recently left to help found startup SocketPlane.

OVN won't necessarily work with every OpenFlow network. Because OVN takes advantage of OpenFlow extensions that were written for OVS, it's going to be best implemented in OVS-based environments, according to the blog post.

The post doesn't mention how well OVN will work with OpFlex, the interface that Cisco is trying to standardize for the kind of policy-based networking that Cisco's Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) performs. Of course, OpFlex isn't as established as OpenFlow or OVSDB.

The real target for OVN will be OpenStack-based networks, where Open vSwitch has become the most popular virtual-switch option. The OVN team will be developing an OpenStack plug-in for their project. Separately, they also plan to work with the container community on building native OVN support for Docker and other types of containers.

As for who this OVN team is — so far, it consists of various people already working on OVS. They'll be communicating about OVN on the ovs-dev mailing list, where they've also posted a more detailed look at OVN.