Hands-on Workshop on

Open vSwitch and Software-defined Networking

Jorge Crichigno
University of South Carolina
http://ce.sc.edu/cyberinfra
[email protected]

WASTC 2021 virtual Faculty Development Weeks (vFDW)

June 21, 2021

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Chapter 1: Introduction

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Software Defined Networks (SDN)
• What is the SDN?
• Much information is available about SDN
• Papers
• Videos
• Books
• However, there is no systematic lab series for IT students and practitioners
• Background overview
• Companion labs

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Software Defined Networks (SDN)
• The goal of the SDN Lab Series is to provide a practical
experience to students and IT practitioners
• The labs provide background information which is reinforced
with hands-on activities
• A good book on SDN network (which matches the SDN Lab Series) is
“Software Defined Networking, A Comprehensive Approach”
• The book is also very approachable for undergraduate and graduate
students, networking professionals, and IT managers

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Section 1.2: Historical Background

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Historical Background
• The major communications networks around the world in the first half of the 20th
century were the telephone networks
• Composed of switching offices, each of which was connected to thousands of telephones
• Switching offices were, in turn, connected to higher-level switching offices (toll offices), to form a
national hierarchy
• The vulnerability of the system was that the destruction of a few key toll offices could fragment it into
many isolated islands

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Historical Background
• Paul Baran, a Polish immigrant who became a researcher working at
Rand Corporation in the US around 1960, argued that in the event of
enemy attack networks like the telephone network were easy to
disrupt
• Mr. Baran’s proposed solution was to transmit the voice signals of the
phone conversations in packets of data that could travel
autonomously – survivable networks (1964) 1
• Digital packet-switching technology

1. P. Baran, Baran, Paul, “On Distributed Communications: I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks,” RAND Corporation, 1964.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html

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Legacy Networks Overview
• A network called ARPANET eventually was implemented using Baran’s ideas
• Funded by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)
• This decentralized, connectionless network grew over the years until bursting upon
the commercial landscape around 1990 in the form of the Internet
• The Internet was a distributed, connectionless architecture

1969 1972 1977

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Legacy Networks Overview
• In the early days, existing protocols were not suitable for running over different
networks
• In 1974, TCP/IP model and protocols were invented by Robert Khan and Vinton Cerf 1
(originally known as the Kahn-Cerf protocol)2

1. V. Cerf, R. Kahn, “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” IEEE Trans. on Comms, vol. 22, No 5, 1974.
2. L. Peterson, B. Davie, “Computer Networks, A Systems Approach,” Online: https://book.systemsapproach.org/

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CSNET and NSFNET
• In 1981, the National Science Foundation (NSF) established the Computer Science
Network (CSNET) to connect ARPANET to other universities / computer scientists
• In 1985, NSF established the NSFnet to link together five supercomputer centers that
were then deployed across the U.S.

Backbone

Regional Regional
networks networks

Campus Campus Campus

networks networks networks
NSFNET backbone
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Section 1.3: The Modern Data Center

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The Modern Data Center
• In 1991, NSFNET lifted its restrictions on the use of NSFNET for commercial purposes
• NSFNET itself would be decommissioned in 1995, with Internet backbone traffic being
carried by commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
• The main event of the 1990s was to be the emergence of the World Wide Web
• Invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee between 1989 and 1991
• The web brought the Internet into the homes, businesses, millions of people

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The Modern Data Center
• A number of companies emerged as big winners in
the Internet space
• Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo, e-Bay, Google, Amazon
• The web gave rise to data centers, hosting heavily
subscribed web services
• Servers were physically arranged into highly
organized rows of racks of servers
• Racks were hierarchically organized, such that
Top-of-Rack (ToR) switches

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The Modern Data Center
• A modern physical servers can host hundreds of virtual machines (VMs), results in
thousands (or even millions) of VMs communicating within the datacenter
• These VMs are now communicating via a set of protocols and devices that were
optimized to work over a large geographical area with unreliable links
• While still important, survivability was not that relevant (in contrast to 1970s, 1980s
WANs) in the emerging data center of late 1990s
• Network management systems designed for carrier public networks or large corporate
intranets simply cannot scale to these numbers
• A new network management paradigm was needed

While the modern data center was the premier driver behind the SDN fervor, by no
means is SDN only applicable to the data center

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Section 1.4: Traditional Switch Architecture

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Data, Control, and Management Planes
• The data plane consists of the various ports that are used for the reception and
transmission of packets and a forwarding table with its associated logic
• The data plane assumes responsibility for packet buffering, packet scheduling, header
modification, and forwarding
• If an arriving packet’s header information is found in the forwarding table, it may be
forwarded without any intervention of the other two planes

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Data, Control, and Management Planes
• Not all packets can be handled exclusively at the data plane, sometimes simply
because their information is not yet entered into the table, or because they belong to a
control protocol that must be processed by the control plane
• The main role of the control plane is to keep current the information in the forwarding
table so that the data plane can independently handle as many packets as possible

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Data, Control, and Management Planes
• Network administrators configure and monitor the switch through the management
plane
• The management plane extracts information from or modifies data in the control and
data planes as appropriate
• The network administrators use some form of network management system to
communicate with the management plane in a switch (e.g., command-line interface)

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Software-based Routing and Bridging
• When a packet arrives on an interface, it is forwarded to the control plane where the
CPU matches the destination address with an entry in its routing table
• The router does this for every packet

Control Plane
CPU

Ingress Egress
interface interface

Data Plane

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Hardware Look-up of Forwarding Tables
• The first major use of hardware acceleration in packet switching was via the use of
Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) for table look-ups
• In the mid-1990s advances in Content-Addressable Memory (CAM) technology made
it possible to perform very high speed look-up using destination address fields

Control Plane
CPU

Ingress Egress
interface interface

ASIC

Data Plane

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Section 1.5: Autonomous and Dynamic Forwarding Tables

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Autonomous and Dynamic Forwarding Tables
• The interface between the control plane and data plane has been historically
proprietary
• A router was a monolithic unit built and internally accessed by the manufacturer only
• Vendor dependence; slow product cycles of vendor equipment, standardization

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 Autonomous and Dynamic Forwarding Tables
• Traditional routers run algorithms to determine how to program its forwarding table

Legacy network

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 Autonomous and Dynamic Forwarding Tables
• Traditional routers run algorithms to determine how to program its forwarding table
• In SDN networks, that function is now performed by the controller
• The controller is responsible for programming packet-matching and forwarding rules

Legacy network SDN network

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 Advantages of SDN Networks
• Ease of network management
• Enforcement of security policies
• Customized network behavior
• Possibility of experimentation and innovation (custom policies, apps can be deployed)
• Packets can be forwarded based on other fields, such as TCP port number

Legacy network SDN network

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Section 1.7: Open Source and Technological Shifts

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 Open Source and Technological Shifts
• The open-source model has revolutionized the way software is developed / delivered
• Functionality that used to be reinvented in every organization is now readily available
• Linux, OpenSSL, open-source routing protocol stacks
• More SDN enabled switches (Cisco, Juniper, etc.), white box programmable switches
(Edgecore, Stordis), SDN applications
• Increase in the pace of innovation (agility of software development)

Legacy network SDN network

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Market Landscape
• SDN was in part conceived to transform the marketplace, inspired by the
transformation that the computing industry went through in previous decades
• The computing industry was historically structured as a vertical market
• A customer wanting a solution to some problem bought a vertically integrated solution from a single
vendor, typically a large mainframe company like IBM

N. McKeown, “Software Defined Networking: How it has transformed networking and what happens next,” Future Forum Summit, Beijing, November 2018.
Online: https://tinyurl.com/vu5b9c6x.

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Market Landscape
• The introduction of microprocessors (e.g., Intel x86, Motorola 68000) and open-source
OSs (e.g., BSD Unix and Linux), helped transform that vertical market into a horizontal
marketplace, with open interfaces spurring innovation at every level

N. McKeown, “Software Defined Networking: How it has transformed networking and what happens next,” Future Forum Summit, Beijing, November 2018.
Online: https://tinyurl.com/vu5b9c6x.

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 Market Landscape
• SDN attempts to spur the same sort of changes in the networking industry
• The goal is a horizontal ecosystem with multiple network operating systems enabled on top of bare-
metal switches

App App App App App App App App App App App

Open Interface
Proprietary
Features
NOX
Control
Beacon ONIX POX
Control
ONOS
Flood
Trema ODL Ryu
Plane 1 Planelight2
Proprietary Open Interface
Operating System
Merchant
Switch Chips
Proprietary
Hardware

N. McKeown, “Software Defined Networking: How it has transformed networking and what happens next,” Future Forum Summit, Beijing, November 2018.
Online: https://tinyurl.com/vu5b9c6x.

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