Networking challenges in data center and cloud environments have received significant attention by industry and standards organizations. The data center environment is dominated by the presence of software networking components (vswitches) in server hypervisors, which may outnumber by an order of magnitude the physical networking nodes. Bridging the gap between server based networking and existing network services is a significant challenge, since the ultimate goal is the design of end-to-end network services. When it comes to advanced L3 services and interoperability with existing managed VPN services, existing solutions rely on static routing and/or centralized routing mechanisms that cannot meet the requirements for resiliency and dynamic networking.
This talk will discuss a simple approach for this problem, which combines traditional control plane and routing protocol approaches with the flexibility of SDN architectures and Openflow. The mechanism relies on maintaining an Openflow interface to hypervisors and utilizing existing routing mechanisms when a scaled out data center deployment is required to federate a number of SDN controllers, or to interoperate with traditional MPLS/VPN network services without the need for dedicated gateways or complex OSS integrations.
From a deployment perspective, we will discuss how this approach can be easily integrated within the Openstack Quantum framework by requiring minimal modifications. The solution also enables the federation and interoperability of Openstack deployments at the network layer even across administrative domains as well as the extension of enterprise networks into Quantum managed networks.
The presentation will conclude with a live demo of the solution.
