Thinking about distributing the network servers

I have been reading up on openvswitch, openflow, and docker and it occurs to me that I might want to take advantage of some of the concepts available to me.  I have a VM Server currently that pretty much limits things to the KVM world, each connected to a specific bridge to a hardware port.  Those hardware ports in turn are connected to a managed switch.  I can do a lot with this setup but I can do better.

One thing that I want to do is distribute the data plane between different VMs and allow for usage of different file servers across my network.  I have plenty of space available to me for various files but because of the need to distribute the VMs between different vlans it becomes more difficult without having several hardware routers in the network.  I want to use SDN and openvswitch to be able to spread the VM connections around to places that I need them as well as give myself the ability to access any device that I want to.  So how would I go about doing this?  I have decided to use openvswitch to spread the network access plane around my house without changing the physical network layout of routers and switches.  I will instead go the virtual route and apply some Software Defined Network (SDN) concepts.

More Later.

Tips #0 - Wow - Amazing Find to Convert VMWare to KVM

I just happened to have enough time over the weekend to look around for some ways to convert from multiple VMWare vmdks to qcow2 and I stumbled across this site.  Now that I have found this site I can go about getting some of my VMs into a KVM setup.  The bash code that I am using is:

#!/bin/bash

for i in *.vmdk; do qemu-img convert -f vmdk $i -O raw $i.raw; done
cat *.raw > tmpImage.raw
qemu-img convert tmpImage.raw finalImage.qcow2
rm *.raw

I cant tell you how much I needed to find this in order to ease the process.  Thanks to Kees Cook and muru for the code.

Also found this to convert spaces in names to underscores:

for f in *\ *; do mv "$f" "${f// /_}"; done

Update: I spent a good portion of the day converting VMWare VMs to qcow2 and then to KVM images.  Life is once again good to me.  I was able to get a number of different VMs related to Penetration Testing completed as well as set up a bridge that could be used for the same.