Starting OVSDB and vSwitchd in OpenvSwitch with Debugging Enabled

[fancy_header3 variation=”orange”]Starting OVSDB and vSwitchd in OpenvSwitch with Debugging Enabled [/fancy_header3]

Here are some quick notes on how I went about debugging OVSDB (ovsdb-server) and OVS vSwitchd (ovs-vsctl). There are lots of ways to debug OVS these are what I used to get debug logs generated. Those logs are helpful troubleshooting for OVSDB transactions and OpenFlow commands when using the ovs-vctl or OVSDB and OpenFlow APIs.

Dont do this unless you are ok w/ trashing the install in case there is something different about your environment then mine 🙂 These are about a year old but I think thats all still the same.

[fancy_header3 variation=”orange”]Start processes for Debugging OVSDB Transactions[/fancy_header3]

If you are having OpenFlow API or ovs-vsctl issues and wanted to debug them, you can enable vswitchd syslog debugging with this.

[fancy_header3 variation=”orange”]Start processes for Debugging vSwitchd[/fancy_header3]

If you are having OpenFlow API or ovs-ofctl issues and wanted to debug them, you can enable vswitchd syslog debugging with this:

[fancy_header3 variation=”orange”]reset-ovs.sh – resets ovs to default[/fancy_header3]

Its a hammer appraoch, prolly more elegant ways but this is what I used for reseting OVS to vanilla and then starting OVSDB w/ debugging enabled.

These commands simply delete and reinitialize the OVS schema conf file and restarts the processes. You can always substitute the startup scripts in place of individually starting the procs.

[fancy_header3 variation=”orange”] debug using the OVS startup scripts[/fancy_header3]

If you dont want to start the processes manually, you can modify the initialization script and look for -vsyslog, -vfile, etc. You can change those to the syslog level that you want. The script is typically generally located at:


Happy hacking!

By Brent Salisbury

I have over 20 years of experience wearing various hats from, network engineer, architect, ops and software engineer. More at Brent's LinkedIn