OPEN vSWITCH + AI is a practical guide to software-defined networking, Open vSwitch, virtual networks, network automation, observability, and intelligent infrastructure.
As Book 3 of the Virtualization & Artificial Intelligence Series, this book builds on the compute and storage foundations established in the previous volumes and focuses on the networking layer that connects virtual machines, containers, storage, services, and physical infrastructure.
Starting with networking fundamentals, you will learn how Ethernet, MAC and IP addresses, interfaces, bridges, switches, VLANs, and virtual networks work before progressing into Open vSwitch architecture, bridges, ports, interfaces, datapaths, flows, OpenFlow, OVSDB, and programmable forwarding.
You will learn to build and manage virtual networks, connect VMs and containers, configure VLANs and trunks, implement bonding, redundancy, QoS, MTU optimization, VXLAN, tunneling, and troubleshoot network failures.
The book then introduces AI as an analytical layer for network telemetry, performance analysis, capacity forecasting, traffic analysis, anomaly detection, predictive network health, and controlled automation.
A core principle guides the approach:
AI should propose. Policies should validate. Authorized automation should execute. Monitoring should verify.
The book culminates in a practical Open vSwitch + AI capstone lab combining virtual networking, telemetry, monitoring, AI-assisted analysis, automation, verification, and rollback.
Ideal for network engineers, system administrators, virtualization and DevOps professionals, cloud engineers, SDN practitioners, students, and homelab builders.