Recently, I began a deep dive into more SDN and OpenFlow. Overall I was very happy with the process and quality of the material out there for newcomers. However, I noticed a gap when I hit my first stumbling block. I set up a mininet instance, noticed it was running Open vSwitch (OVS) v2.0. I needed a newer version of OVS, and turfed the mininet instance while the upgrading OVS. It quickly became apparent that I needed a repeatable development environment setup....
Recently I got to work with the NSX API and write a tool to do a quick health check of NSX networks. nsxchecker is a valuable operational tool to quickly report a NSX network’s health. One of the promises of SDN is automated tooling for operational teams and with the NSX API I was quickly able to deliver. nsxchecker accepts a NSX lswitch UUID or a neutron_net_id. Rackspace’s Neutron plugin, quark, tags created lports with a neutron_net_id....
Operating Open vSwitch brings a new set of challenges. One of those challenges is managing Open vSwitch itself and making sure you’re up to date with performance and stability fixes. For example, in late 2013 there were significant performance improvements with the release of 1.11 ( flow wildcarding!) and in the 2.x series there are even more improvements coming. This means everyone running those old versions of OVS (I’m looking at you, <=1....
I’ve been looking into the SDN craze over the past few weeks and assembled a few links along the way: Openstack Quantum Video Fundamentals of VXLAN - Do we really need Stateless Transport Tunneling (STT)? Software Defined Data Center - very cool to see this coming from a KY university, even if it is UK =P Dodging Open Protocols with Software On that note … all of Brad Hedlund’s site Open vSwitch FAQ