SONiC Virtual Switch

nospam@example.com (Raymond P. Burkholder) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 03:54:08 +0000

I've been hearing more and more about the SONiC Virtual Switch. It has come a long way since it's debut at an Open Compute conference some number of years ago.

To give it a try on non-ONIE hardware (nothing handy at the moment), this is what I did to get the .vs image working on my local Proxmox box:

Download recent sonic-vs.img.gz version from Sonic Software
scp the image over onto my Proxmox box
gunzip the image
```
gunzip sonic-vs.img.gz
```
construct a virtual machine with: 4 cpu, 4G memory, q35, SeaBIOS, no-cd, no drive
assign an interface which supplies DHCP

import the disk into the vm (this one has vmid of 116)

qm disk import 116 sonic-vs.img local-btrfs --target-disk ide0

in options, set boot order to ide0, disable pxe and cd
start it up, and log in with the credentials supplied at the download site
once I confirmed it had an address, I was able to ssh with:
```
ssh admin@<ipaddr> -o PreferredAuthentications=password
```

Add additional instances to build infrastructure. Add interfaces to build a network.

Raymond P. Burkholder - Things I Do - Networks

SONiC Virtual Switch