Local networks in an Open vSwitch implementation behave similar to that of a Linux bridge implementation. Instances in local networks are connected to the integration bridge and can communicate with other instances in the same network and local VLAN. There are no flow rules created for local networks, however.

Traffic between instances in the same network remains local to the virtual switch, and by definition, local to the compute node on which they reside. This means that connectivity to services hosted on other nodes, such as DHCP and metadata, will be unavailable to any instance not on the same host as those services.