OpenDaylight as an NFV Controller

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The OpenDaylight and OPNFV Projects: An Update as of Brahma/Beryllium

By Dave Neary of Red Hat and SeniorTechnical Marketing Manager of OpenDaylight and OPNFV, Alan Sardella

In discussing our use cases, we’ve noticed that a key domain for OpenDaylight (ODL) is Cloud and NFV. ODL is closely tied to NFV and accordingly works very closely with the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), a related project with the Linux Foundation that concentrates on providing a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform to accelerate the introduction of new NFV products and services.

OpenDaylight an important upstream community and key component of the OPNFV platform.

The OPNFV community is working on establishing focused community groups to describe community engagement practices, identify community leaders, and manage contributions toward those communities.

With regard to OPNFV integration, the OPNFV project creates blueprints for needed OpenDaylight functions, acts in conjunction with community members from OpenDaylight which transitions upstream for community review and discussion. One key example of this is that  

OPNFV helps ODL refine and develop features (and fix bugs) as an SDN controller for NFV.  

The latest OPNFV release, Brahmaputra, includes the Beryllium release of ODL.  

Multiple OPNFV projects, including Doctor, Promise, Multisite, Copper, HA, IPv6, Escalator, are have worked with or are planning blueprints addressing ODL capabilities. Additionally, the CPerf(controller performance) project has active members from both ODL and OPNFV.  

In the recent Beryllium release, there were many enhancements focused on Cloud and NFV. We focused on coexistence between multiple controller instances and applications such as SFC and L2VPN. Other enhancements to cloud networking include Distributed Virtual Routing (DVR), which avoids a single point of failure by including Layer 3 routing information on each node. We also added clustering support for an end-to-end, highly available SDN controller for OpenStack.

Relevant applications include traffic engineering, cloud network virtualization, L2/L3 VPNs with DC interconnectivity, SFC, network QoS, monitoring and analytics. Larger use cases include virtual CPE.

In the upcoming Boron release, we will be continue to enhance our coexistence support. We will also be enabling Layer 2 gateways with hardware-based VXLAN tunnel endpoints (HW-VTEP) for Layer 2 segment bridging in either the physical or virtual domains–this will permit end to end Layer 2 VPNs. Other key areas of focus will be on policy and on vector packet processing (VPP) and honeycomb enablement, enabling high performance flow management.

Communication sector users continue to increase in number, including many major service providers: Orange, China Mobile, AT&T, T-Mobile, Comcast, KT Corporation, Telefonica,TeliaSonera, China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, and Globe Telecom. Many of these provide membership on ODL’s advisory board.   

And the future is bright–as OpenDaylight continues to capture the imagination of a growing user base, the next step will be to see increased adoption for production workloads.

A note about authors:

Dave Neary works on SDN and NFV community strategy as a member of Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards team. He is an active participant in OPNFV, a project whose goal is to promote NFV as a core use-case to upstream projects such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight. He is also an active community participant in the OpenDaylight project.

Alan Sardella runs product and technical marketing for the OpenDaylight and OPNFV projects.

This article was originally published at OpenDaylight.org.