Skip to content

Teaching AI to Debug OVN: Layer-Aware Troubleshooting with the ovn-kubernetes MCP Server#

Open vSwitch and OVN 2026 Fall Conference digest Program Core pick 2–4 November 2026

Abstract

Keshav Kabra, NVIDIA; Surya Seetharaman, Red Hat, LLC.

  • Why: Sits squarely on the PM's AI-for-infrastructure interest: a community MCP server that exposes OVN/OVS/K8s/kernel layers to AI agents as structured tools, with an honest accounting of where AI triage helps and where humans still must check.
  • What: The ovn-kubernetes MCP server: read-only, structured tools wrapping ovn-nbctl, ovn-sbctl, ovn-trace, ovs-ofctl, ovs-appctl plus Kubernetes and kernel-networking state — working on live clusters and offline on must-gather/sos-report artifacts. Includes a demo of an agent tracing a symptom from pod to logical/physical datapath to root cause. (from abstract only)
  • How: Deliberate design choices: wrapper tools rather than generic exec, least-privilege access, tools grouped by network layer — a reusable pattern for exposing infrastructure primitives to LLM agents safely.
  • Where applicable: General to OVN-Kubernetes clusters today; the MCP-wrapping pattern transfers to any layered system. Triage-assist, not autonomous repair.