Category: OpenFlow

OpenFlow in HP Campus Solutions on Software Gone Wild

When I finished my SDN workshop @ Interop Las Vegas (including a chapter on OpenFlow limitations), some attendees started wondering whether they should even consider OpenFlow in their SDN deployments. My answer: don’t blame the tool if people use it incorrectly.

Two days later, I discovered HP is one of those companies that knows how to use that tool.

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Response: Why Technology Still Matters

My good friend Tom Hollingsworth wrote a great blog post about hypermyopia in the networking industry. I agree with most everything he wrote (I have to – I’m always telling people to focus on business needs and to change their mentality before relying on shiny new gizmos), but I still think it’s crucial to consider the technology used in products we’re looking at.

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Big Cloud Fabric: Scaling OpenFlow Fabric

I’m still convinced that architectures with centralized control planes (and that includes solutions relying on OpenFlow controllers) cannot scale. On the other hand, Big Switch Networks is shipping Big Cloud Fabric, and they claim they solved the problem. Obviously I wanted to figure out what’s going on and Andy Shaw and Rob Sherwood were kind enough to explain the interesting details of their solution.

Long story short: Big Switch Networks significantly extended OpenFlow.

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The Four Paths to SDN

After the initial onslaught of SDN washing, four distinct approaches to SDN have started to emerge, from centralized control plane architectures to smart reuse of existing protocols.

As always, each approach has its benefits and drawbacks, and there’s no universally best solution. You just got four more (somewhat immature) tools in your toolbox. And now for the details.

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Just Published: SDN and OpenFlow – The Hype and the Harsh Reality

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know that I spent a lot of time during the last three years debunking SDN myths, explaining the limitations of OpenFlow and pointing out other technologies one could use to program the network.

During the summer of 2014 I organized my SDN- and OpenFlow-related blog posts into a digital book. I want to make this information as useful and as widely distributed as possible – for a limited time you can download the PDF free of charge.

Learn more about the book

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Cloud Orchestration System Is an Ideal Controller Use Case

A while ago I explained why OpenFlow might be a wrong tool for some jobs, and why centralized control plane might not make sense, and quickly got misquoted as saying “controllers don’t scale”. Nothing could be further from the truth, properly architected controller-based architectures can reach enormous scale – Amazon VPC is the best possible example.

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Is OpenFlow the Best Tool for Overlay Virtual Networks?

Overlay virtual networks were the first commercial-grade OpenFlow use case – Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform (NVP – rebranded as VMware NSX for Multiple Hypervisors after the acquisition, and finally rearchitected into VMware NSX-T) used OpenFlow to program the hypervisor virtual switches (Open vSwitches – OVS).

OpenStack is using the same approach in its OVS Neutron plugin, and it seems Open Daylight aims to reinvent that same wheel, replacing OVS plugin running on the hypervisor host agent with central controller.

Does that mean one should always use OpenFlow to implement overlay virtual networks? Not really, OpenFlow is not exactly the best tool for the job.

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Optimizing OpenFlow Hardware Tables

Initial OpenFlow hardware implementations used a simplistic approach: install all OpenFlow entries in TCAM (the hardware that’s used to implement ACLs and PBR) and hope for the best.

That approach was good enough to get you a tick-in-the-box on RFP responses, but it fails miserably when you try to get OpenFlow working in a reasonably sized network. On the other hand, many problems people try to solve with OpenFlow, like data center fabrics, involve simple destination-only L2 or L3 switching.

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Is OpenFlow Useful?

The Does Centralized Control Plane Make Sense post triggered several comments along the lines of “do you think there’s no need for OpenFlow?

TL;DR version: OpenFlow is just a low-level tool; don’t blame it for how it’s being promoted… but once you figure out it’s nothing more than TCAM (ACL+PBR) programming tool, you’ll quickly find a few interesting use cases. If only we’d have hardware we could use to implement them; most vendors gave up years ago.

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