Description
The OpenFlow, Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) Workshop (SDNWS) v2.0 is a 2-day instructor-led course that introduces the learners to the technologies that fuel the latest hype bubble in the networking industry and Cisco Cloud environments.
Based on vendor and industry press promises, well-published OpenFlow deployment with Google's internal network, and numerous other industry initiatives, these technologies became an unavoidable boardroom discussion as Cisco Clouds and enterprises try to seek new revenue streams or optimize their costs.
On the other hand, many engineers are left wondering what is really going on behind the scenes and how useful these technologies might be in real-life networks.
The focus of the SDNWS workshop is on real-life deployment scenarios and design discussions.
The workshop was developed by Ivan Pepelnjak
Ivan Pepelnjak, CCIE#1354 (Emeritus), has been designing and implementing large-scale Cisco Cloud and enterprise networks using advanced and emerging technologies since 1990.
Ivan started analyzing OpenFlow-based solutions and writing about OpenFlow technology and SDN concepts in early 2011. He was moderating the first-ever OpenFlow symposium in Silicon Valley in September 2011, had SDN presentations at RIPE and other regional ISP meetings, ran full-day SDN workshops at Interop and Troopers, and created OpenFlow/SDN webinars for NEC, VMware and Nuage Networks.
Ivan published two books on SDN and OpenFlow in 2014, and helped large multinational organizations and equipment vendors familiarize themselves with SDN concepts, evaluate their SDN strategies, and plan and design SDN pilots. He’s also the author of several Cisco Press books, prolific blogger at blog.ipspace.net and author of a series of highly successful webinars.
Based on vendor and industry press promises, well-published OpenFlow deployment with Google's internal network, and numerous other industry initiatives, these technologies became an unavoidable boardroom discussion as Cisco Clouds and enterprises try to seek new revenue streams or optimize their costs.
On the other hand, many engineers are left wondering what is really going on behind the scenes and how useful these technologies might be in real-life networks.
The focus of the SDNWS workshop is on real-life deployment scenarios and design discussions.
The workshop was developed by Ivan Pepelnjak
Ivan Pepelnjak, CCIE#1354 (Emeritus), has been designing and implementing large-scale Cisco Cloud and enterprise networks using advanced and emerging technologies since 1990.
Ivan started analyzing OpenFlow-based solutions and writing about OpenFlow technology and SDN concepts in early 2011. He was moderating the first-ever OpenFlow symposium in Silicon Valley in September 2011, had SDN presentations at RIPE and other regional ISP meetings, ran full-day SDN workshops at Interop and Troopers, and created OpenFlow/SDN webinars for NEC, VMware and Nuage Networks.
Ivan published two books on SDN and OpenFlow in 2014, and helped large multinational organizations and equipment vendors familiarize themselves with SDN concepts, evaluate their SDN strategies, and plan and design SDN pilots. He’s also the author of several Cisco Press books, prolific blogger at blog.ipspace.net and author of a series of highly successful webinars.
Objectives
Upon completing this workshop, the learner will be able to meet these overall objectives:
- Describe the technology fundamentals of OpenFlow, SDN and NFV
- List the advantages and pitfalls of OpenFlow, SDN and NFV
- Describe the potential use cases including a brief overview of some existing deployments
Outline
The workshop contains these components:
- The Need for Software Defined Networking:
- While the whole IT industry has been moving toward highly automated solutions in the last decade, networking has remained stuck—most networking engineers are still manually configuring individual devices.
- There is high time we change the deployment and operational processes and reduce the amount of time spent doing repetitive manual tasks; this part of the workshop will give you some high-level guidelines.
- The first part of the workshop focuses on technologies underlying SDN and NFV—OpenFlow, NETCONF, APIs, virtualization and virtual appliances.
- Software Defined Networking Explained:
- Software-defined networking is not a new technology—we have been using the concepts of programmable networks for decades.
- This section describes the motivations behind the SDN movement, its principles and perfect use cases, and numerous technologies that you can use to program the network devices. It will also try to answer the fundamental questions: When, Why and How should you program your network.
- Introduction to OpenFlow:
- This section describes the concepts of OpenFlow, a new protocol used to decouple control plane (topology discovery, path calculation, and so on) from data plane (packet forwarding). It covers the following topics:
- Traditional forwarding with distributed routing protocols
- Controller-based forwarding
- Basics of OpenFlow protocol
- Benefits and drawbacks of OpenFlow
- This section describes the concepts of OpenFlow, a new protocol used to decouple control plane (topology discovery, path calculation, and so on) from data plane (packet forwarding). It covers the following topics:
- OpenFlow Deep Dive:
- After the introduction to OpenFlow concepts, the workshop includes a deep dive into the details of OpenFlow protocol, including:
- OpenFlow forwarding model
- OpenFlow ports, classifiers, and actions
- OpenFlow groups and multi-table support
- QoS in OpenFlow networks
- OpenFlow protocol details
- Simple OpenFlow use cases, from controller-based topology discovery and learning bridges to distributed routing and control-plane protocols
- OpenFlow deployment models and real-life implementations
- After the introduction to OpenFlow concepts, the workshop includes a deep dive into the details of OpenFlow protocol, including:
- OpenFlow Scalability Challenges:
- OpenFlow concepts are not new and share scalability challenges with similar technologies and architectures including Frame Relay, ATM, ForCES and MPLS-TP. This section discusses the major OpenFlow scalability challenges:
- Hardware limitations
- Proactive and reactive forwarding table setup
- Hop-by-hop and path-based forwarding
- Control-plane scalability and lack of shared fate
- OpenFlow concepts are not new and share scalability challenges with similar technologies and architectures including Frame Relay, ATM, ForCES and MPLS-TP. This section discusses the major OpenFlow scalability challenges:
- Benefits of Network Function Virtualization:
- If you open a firewall, load balancer, WAN accelerator or almost any other network services appliance, you will find one or more x86 processors, standard GE/10GE NICs and some custom packet handling logic. Is there any reason we have to be tied to physical hardware? Would it not be better to deploy the same services in virtual machine format and make them flexible? That is the fundamental concept of NFV.
- Does it really make sense to replace physical network services appliances with virtual machines? What are the benefits and drawbacks of NFV approach? This section will give you the answers you need to start evaluating applicability of NFV in your environment.
- BGP-Based SDN:
- Numerous SDN solutions use BGP as the controller-to-device communication protocol. This section explains the basics of BGP-based SDN, documents several typical use cases and gives practical deployment guidelines, including sample open-source-based controller implementation.
- Network Programmability with NETCONF and YANG:
- NETCONF is a protocol widely used to configure networking devices (it is supported by Brocade, Cisco, Juniper and other vendors). This section describes NETCONF and YANG (the data model description language used by NETCONF), their benefits and shortcomings, and the vendor-specific implementation details:
- What are NETCONF and YANG?
- Why are SNMP, CLI and REST not good enough?
- Where did NETCONF and YANG come from?
- How does NETCONF work?
- How does YANG work?
- Why would you write a YANG module? Is it useful?
- I want to deploy a service like MPLS VPN—are NETCONF and YANG useful?
- Tools you can use to test your NETCONF code
- Differences in NETCONF implementations
- Deployment examples
- NETCONF is a protocol widely used to configure networking devices (it is supported by Brocade, Cisco, Juniper and other vendors). This section describes NETCONF and YANG (the data model description language used by NETCONF), their benefits and shortcomings, and the vendor-specific implementation details:
- Network Automation with Chef, Puppet and Ansible:
- Chef, Puppet and Ansible are the most popular server configuration management tools, and all of them get used in network automation solutions.
- This section describes the fundamentals of all three tools, their typical implementation on network devices, and the potential benefits and drawbacks of using them. It then focuses on Ansible, which is commonly the tool-of-choice due to its agentless design.
- SDN and Controller-Based Networking Deployment Considerations:
- Networking solutions with centralized network intelligence or control plane have existed for almost half a century (IBM SNA, ATM, Frame Relay, Ipsilon Flow Management Protocols).
- Not surprisingly, novel SDN architectures using centralized controller clusters exhibit similar challenges:
- Single points of failure
- Impact of network partitions
- Balance between tightly- and loosely-coupled elements
- Control plane and controller security
- Impact of data plane activity on control-plane performance (punting to control plane)
- Control plane denial of service (DoS) attacks
- This section describes typical SDN deployment considerations, ranging from architectural and design challenges to security and operational considerations.
- Real-Life SDN Use Cases:
- Cisco Clouds and enterprises are already deploying SDN, using NETCONF, BGP or OpenFlow as the implementation technology. This section describes numerous use cases based on real-life deployments:
- Data center fabrics (Arista XMPP, Juniper QFabric, NEC ProgrammableFlow, Plexxi controller)
- Forwarding optimizations and exception routing with BGP (Microsoft)
- Optimized WAN edge forwarding (Spotify/Arista)
- Centralized traffic engineering with OpenFlow (Google)
- Programmable network taps and tap aggregation networks (Arista, NEC, Big Switch, Cisco)
- Network monitoring (Plexxi Control, HP SDN VAN controller)
- Network services insertion (NEC ProgrammableFlow, segment routing, virtualization solutions)
- Software-defined WAN
- Scale-out load balancing (NEC/Riverbed) and firewalling (Arista/Palo Alto)
- Scale-out intrusion detection system (University of Indiana)
- DoS mitigation tools (remote-triggered black holes, BGP Flowspec, NEC/Radware)
- Edge policy enforcement
- Cisco Clouds and enterprises are already deploying SDN, using NETCONF, BGP or OpenFlow as the implementation technology. This section describes numerous use cases based on real-life deployments: