SDN
SDN
SDN
for
CCNA Students
By
Eng. Abeer Hosni
SDN(Software-Defined Networking):
- All network traffic is classified to control plane, data plane and management plane.
- SDN moves the intelligence of the network (control plane) from individual devices to
a central device (controller).
- The GUI application is a layer above the controller which shows the admin every thing
running in the network. For example, a red line indicates a congested path, and a
yellow icons of routers and switches indicates a failure whith in the last week.
SDN Components:
- The controller (Ex: APIC-EM).
- The API (Application Program Interface): Used to help communication
between the controller and the network devices. The API usually is a
proprietary.
Interface types:
SBI (Southbound Interface)
Hint:
Open flow is an open standard API protocol.
NetConf is an open standard protocol created by IETF, used to push
configuration to devices.
OPFlex is an open standard protocol which assumes that the
device has a little control plane.
SDN Architecture:
Application layer: business application.
Control layer: SDN controller.
Infrastructure layer: network devices.
SDN Models:
Complete centralization of the control plane
(Open SDN solution)
- It is a theory till now. A lot of companies with the Open
Networking Foundation work together to build that controller.
- That model will use the open flow protocol which deals only with switches,
not routers. The switch will be a white box switch which is a generic switch
only builds MAC address table and all other switching features like STP,
DTP will the responsibility of the controller.
- The “Open Day Light Controller” is the controller to use when dealing with
this model. It is an open source code application. It supports Open flow,
NetConf, PCEP, BGP-LS and OVSDB protocols.
- The network devices have some control plane. The servers in the data
center are classified to groups according to their BW and QOS needs.
The controller applies a policy to each group of applications
- The controller pushes commands to the devices and collects statistics about
the devices then uses NBI protocol tells the upper application about the
network which then can modify the devices configuration.
Best wishes:
Abeer