SDN as I mentioned in previous discussion is to separate out the Control Plane from Router or any network component and provide the centralized place to control the whole Network Topology. You know in any Network device, we have Control Plane, Mgmt Plane and Data plane doing their own set of work (e.g in Cisco 6509 you have Line cards acting as Dataplane, Route Processor as Control Plane and Mgmt plane is how you are accessing the device via SSH/Telnet etc) and in SDN you are separating out the Control plane from these Network devices to make them only works as pure Forwarding devices.

All the routing protocols and control data is taken care by Centralized location which in SDN terminology is called “SDN Controller”. SDN Controller talks to Infrastructure (Forwarding Network devices) via Southbound APIs and Controller can talk to Applications above it via Northbound APIs as you can see in image below.

Source :-www.opennetworking.org

So you will build Applications like any software on your desktop which talks to Controller and Controller then talks to Forwarding devices via Southbound APIs. In this way you will have centralized way of communicating with Forwarding Network devices and Network devices only work will be to send the traffic from one source to destination as fast as possible without worrying about Control protocols like OSPF, BGP, ISIS etc.

Most common Southbound interface is Openflow which is Open source protocol developed by ONF (Open Networking Foundation). Network devices can be specialized hardware switches from companies like Cisco, Brocade, Juniper etc. or they can be Virtual devices (VMs) for which they are called Open vSwitch. Only requirement for Hardware switches to use with Openflow is that those switches should be able to support Openflow. There are several products in market from various hardware vendors which supports Openflow i.e. Juniper EX9200 Ethernet Switches, MX960 Router, Big Switch Networks – Big Virtual Switch and many many more.

Openflow is not the only protocol which you use for Controller to talk to Network devices; instead other protocols like SNMP, NetConfig, OVSDB are also there but most common protocol in use is Openflow only and all the companies who are currently building the Openflow support are members of ONF as I explained above.

There are various pre-built VM packages you can get today from Internet which you can run from VMware or Virtual Box and they will open the Interface from where you can create your own topologies to work with. Topologies like 1 Virtual Controller, 3 OpenvSwitches with 3 Hosts. Those VM Images will come pre-built with SDN Controllers, Open vSwitch with support for Openflow, Mininet to create and run example topologies, Wireshark, JDK 1.8, Eclipse Luna etc etc.

In next blogs, i will try to give more from hands on perspective from one of these VM Packages and will also talk about how some projects are currently using this.

Please let me know if you have any queries.

Mohit Mittal