Brocade SDN Controller Overview
User organizations interested in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) typically cite two main reasons for exploring SDN:
• The ability to optimize their choices of networking platforms independently of their architectural needs
• The need for programmability to support rapid service design, development, and teardown.
Both of these needs have arisen within the larger movement towards more flexible, automated IT systems. Growing user expectations of customized, on-demand IT services—driven by the strength and ease of use of major public cloud providers—is fostering a new understanding of IT as a logical, distributed, and highly dynamic system.
The Brocade® SDN Controller is the first commercial distribution built directly from OpenDaylight Helium code, without any proprietary extensions or platform dependencies. Organizations can freely optimize their network infrastructures to match the needs of their workloads, and develop network applications that can be run on any OpenDaylight-based controller (Figure 1).
The Brocade SDN Controller package includes tools and services to quickly and confidently implement software-defined networks within existing environments. Brocade provides multivendor compatibility testing and complete, single-source support for Brocade SDN Controller environments, backed by the expertise of leaders within the OpenDaylight developer community.
Brocade SDN Controller OpenStack Integration
OpenStack can use the Brocade SDN Controller through the Modular Layer 2 (ML2) northbound plugin. The controller manages the network flows for the OpenStack compute and network nodes through the Open vSwitch Database (OVSDB) management protocol southbound plug-in. When the controller is integrated with OpenStack, it manages the Layer 2 networks on the OpenStack nodes and controls the Open vSwitch (OVS) that is running on OpenStack nodes, as shown in the following figure. When a new virtual machine (VM) is created and attached to a network, the controller creates a VXLAN tunnel between OpenStack nodes. After the tunnel is created, the tenant VMs on different compute nodes are able to reach other.
With this integration, the controller is responsible for the following operations:
• Controlling OpenStack Layer 2 network CRUD operations on the controller
• Creating the VXLAN tunnel, which provides the network type for communication among VMs
• Attaching the VM interface to the network when tenant VMs are instantiated by creating ports and wiring them to the VXLAN tunnel on the integration bridge (br-int) of the OVS
For more information please visit www.brocade.com/sdncontroller
Product Page
The Brocade SDN Controller plug-in is included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.
To download the plugin and to obtain installation and configuration information, please visit the Brocade OpenStack Wiki page.
Learn more on Brocade's involvement with OpenStack at http://www.brocade.com/OpenStack.
Category
Red Hat Certifications
This product has been certified to run on the following Red Hat products and technologies:
