GoBGP – A Control Plane Evolving Software Networking
If I have talked to you over the past year or two about networking, odds are I have mentioned a project to you called GoBGP. If we have spoken a lot, you are probably sick of me talking to you about GoBGP 🙂 There is a reason, it’s because GoBGP is a missing link in networking that has been for …
Time to Ditch the Definition of SDN
While at a stoplight looking at the random news feeds on Linkedin I ran across a post of a recent blog post by the ONF and the subsequent conversation where my friend Ivan Pepenlnjak commented. So I threw in my two cents and quickly regretted it because Linkedin has an amazing ability to frustrate me as it updated the comment …
Setting Up Overlays on Open vSwitch
Most “SDN” solutions involve overlays or at the least HW overlay gateways/ToR of some type. Some sell overlays terminating in hardware, others sell overlays terminating in the server. The encaps include standards like GRE, VXLAN and soon to be Geneve (Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation: basically the good parts of the other encaps evolved). While none of these overlay networks should …
Install Open vSwitch v2 from Source on Red Hat Fedora 19
This is a walk through for installing Open vSwitch v2.0+ on RedHat Fedora 19 from source. If you want to build Open vSwitch from RPM binaries please see this post There are some new OVS tables included in the latest builds that include some neat concepts. OVS is often regarded as the SDN reference data plane implementation in the early …
Installing Mininet, OpenDaylight and Open vSwitch
The easiest way to get started with a quick SDN lab image is using the Mininet image that is now managed by the ONLAB which is part of the ONRC. They do a nice job keeping the images maintained. Ideally the will incorporate ODL into the image soon since the ODL GUI is great for folks to get started with …
Eliminating VLANs and Fragility in the Underlay with Network Virtualization
This post is not intended to participate in the vendor Overlay vs. Underlay vs. Open OS vs. closed NOS but rather a network centric look at some things I am considering. The simple answer is routing scales and bridging doesn’t in my experience. As I look back at the first decade in my career I spent operating and designing Ethernet …
Getting Started With OVSDB
OVSDB (Open vSwtich Database) is a management protocol used to manipulate the configuration of Open vSwitches and more recently vendors have begun implementing OVSDB in their Ethernet switches firmware. Some of those vendor data plane implementations are already running OVS under the hood so the implementation should be relatively painless. A project I am involved in developing is the OVSDB …
The OpenFlow Overlay
Integrating SDN beyond the data center is still the wild west. The needs are very similar, traffic classification and policy instantiation at the edge. Data center solutions then abstract the underlying network with tunneling/encapsulation mechanisms to achieve IP mobility among other things. Outside the data center, some may care about choosing a forwarding path beyond the SPF calculation accounting for …
