SDN Controller - OpenDayLight

 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

https://www.opendaylight.org/downloads

wget https://nexus.opendaylight.org/content/groups/public/org/opendaylight/integration/distribution-karaf/0.3.3-Lithium-SR3/distribution-karaf-0.3.3-Lithium-SR3.tar.gz

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

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.