SDN Controller - OpenDayLight - Build your own test lab
Is it time to throw away traditional switching-routing technologies and embrace SDN ?? I don’t think so yet, but we are certainly moving towards that.
There are a lot of resources out there in the internet regarding Software Defined networking (SDN). Big number of network vendors are releasing SDN products including many industry leaders. There are quite a few opensource SDN Controllers as well: OpenDayLight, OpenContrail, Floodlight, Ryu.
As a network world geek, I can't resist trying out one of these SDN controllers. Below are the simplest steps of installing OpenDaylight(ODL) and Mininet to get started. I used Ubuntu 12 in a virtual machine for this test.
Step 1: Install ODL
Get the download link of ODL you desire
Extract the compressed file.
tar -zxvf distribution-karaf-0.3.3-Lithium-SR3.tar.gz
Install java, maven which are prerequisite for ODL.
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk maven
Step 2: Start ODL
Export JAVA_HOME path and start Karaf
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/
cd distribution-karaf-0.3.3-Lithium-SR3/
./bin/karaf
cd distribution-karaf-0.3.3-Lithium-SR3/
./bin/karaf
Add L2 switch and Web-gui features from karaf console.
feature:install odl-restconf odl-l2switch-switch odl-openflowplugin-all odl-mdsal-apidocs odl-dlux-all
Step 3: Install and run Mininet
Mininet is a simulation tool to create virtual network supporting openflow.
sudo apt-get install mininet
You might want to run “apt-get update” beforehand to get updated list of packages from the repository.
Run mininet with tree topology
sudo mn --controller=remote,ip=127.0.0.1 --topo=tree,3
Step 5: Open ODL Web Interface
Enter http://localhost:8080/index.html in your browser with default user and password (admin/admin) to login.
