wiki:GENIExperimenter/Tutorials/OpenFlowOVS-Floodlight/DesignSetup

Version 7 (modified by pjayanth@bbn.com, 7 years ago) (diff)

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Intro to OpenFlow Tutorial (OVS)

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Overview
In this tutorial we are going to use Open vSwitch (OVS) as an OpenFlow switch connected to three hosts. OVS is a software switch running on a compute resource. The other three hosts can only communicate through the OVS switch. The experiment will need (the rspecs for this exercise are provided later in this section):
  • 1 Xen VM with a public IP to run an OpenFlow controller
  • 1 Xen VM to be the OpenFlow switch
  • 3 Xen VMs as hosts
Experiment Topology

Step 1. Obtain resources

For the following reservation you can use any aggregate.

Note You can use compute resources from any InstaGENI rack and any reservation tool (Portal, jFed, Omni, etc) For a list of available InstaGENI racks see the GENI Production Resources page.
  1. Reserve your network, that includes a VM with OVS installed.

RSpec: You can use the following url, url: https://floodlight.atlassian.net/wiki/download/attachments/45645828/TransparentRedirectFINAL.xml?version=1&modificationDate=1463690438218&api=v2

Note You will need SSH access to your nodes. If you don't know how to SSH to your reserved hosts learn how to login

Step 2. Configure the Floodlight Controller

Once a site has been chosen and all of the resources are up, go ahead and ssh into the controller. All of the commands in this section are going to be run from within the controller resource. There are a few things that we need to install, the first being Floodlight! It’s located on GitHub, so we’ll just grab that using the following command:

git clone http://github.com/floodlight/floodlight

We need to install other dependencies since Floodlight was recently updated to support Java 8. Enter the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

Confirm the java version by typing the command:

java -version

Now we need to compile the controller. We are going to do that by using the tool ant. Enter the following command to install ant:

sudo apt-get install ant

To communicate with the Floodlight Controller using the built-in REST API's, we need to install the tool curl. Enter the following command:

sudo apt-get install curl

Now we can compile the controller. Enter the following commands:

cd floodlight
ant

You can start the Floodlight Controller using the command:

java -jar target/floodlight.jar

Step 3. Configure the Open vSwitch

Overview: Although OVS is installed and initialized on the host that is meant to act as a software switch, it has not been configured yet. There are two main things that need to be configured:

(1) configure your software switch with the interfaces as ports and
(2) point the switch to an OpenFlow controller.

3a. Configure the Software Switch (OVS Window)

  1. Login to the OVS host
  2. Create an Ethernet bridge that will act as our software switch:
    sudo ovs-vsctl add-br br0
    
  3. Prepare the interfaces to be added as ports to the OVS switch
    • Your OVS bridge will be a Layer 2 switch and your ports do not need IP addresses. Before we remove them let's keep some information
      • Run ifconfig
      • Write down the interface that corresponds to the connection to the Floodlight Controller. It will have an IP of 192.168.1.1. This is the control plane interface.
      • Write down the interface names that correspond to the connections to your hosts. You will see three interfaces with IP's 10.10.*.*, one for each host. These are the data plane interfaces.
      • Remove the IP from your data interfaces.
        Be careful not to bring down eth0. This is the control interface, if you bring that interface down you won't be able to login to your host. For all interfaces other than eth0 and l0 and the control plane interface (your interface names may vary) run :
        sudo ifconfig ethX 0  
        sudo ifconfig ethY 0 
        sudo ifconfig ethZ 0 
        
  4. Add all the data interfaces to your switch (bridge).
    Be careful not to add interface eth0. This is the control interface. So now that we know the names of our three 10.10.*.* interfaces, we can add them as ports to our bridge. These three interfaces are your data interfaces.
    sudo  ovs-vsctl add-port br0 ethX 
    sudo  ovs-vsctl add-port br0 ethY 
    sudo  ovs-vsctl add-port br0 ethZ 
    
  5. Trust but verify. Congratulations! You have configured your software switch. To verify the three ports configured run:
    sudo ovs-vsctl list-ports br0
    

3b. Point your switch to a controller

Note An OpenFlow switch will not forward any packet unless instructed by a controller. Basically the forwarding table is empty, until an external controller inserts forwarding rules. The OpenFlow controller communicates with the switch over the control network and it can be anywhere in the Internet as long as it is reachable by the OVS host.

  1. In order to point our software OpenFlow switch to the controller, in the ovs terminal window, run:
    sudo ovs-vsctl set-controller br0 tcp:192.168.1.2:6653
    
  2. Set your switch to fail-safe-mode. For more info read the standalone vs secure mode section. Run:
    sudo ovs-vsctl set-fail-mode br0 secure
    
  3. Trust but verify. You can verify your OVS settings by issuing the following:
    sudo ovs-vsctl show
    

3c. standalone vs secure mode

The OpenFlow controller is responsible for setting up all flows on the switch, which means that when the controller is not running there should be no packet switching at all. Depending on the setup of your network, such a behavior might not be desired. It might be best that when the controller is down, the switch should default back to being a learning layer 2 switch. In other circumstances however this might be undesirable. In OVS this is a tunable parameter, called fail-safe-mode which can be set to the following parameters:

  • standalone [default]: in this case OVS will take responsibility for forwarding the packets if the controller fails
  • secure: in this case only the controller is responsible for forwarding packets, and if the controller is down all packets are dropped.

In OVS when the parameter is not set it falls back to the standalone mode. For the purpose of this tutorial we will set the fail-safe-mode to secure, since we want to be the ones controlling the forwarding.


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