Category Archives: CCIE General

CCIE Evolving Technologies – SDN Controllers

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SDN Controllers

Don’t have a clue about SDN?

Aptly named, the Software Defined Networking Controller is the “brains” of the operation. This device sits at the top of your SDN hierarchy. This device is critical for your applications to communicate with the physical routers and switches that makeup your network.

The SDN Controller possesses a “global” view of the entire network. It knows about all of the nodes, the best paths between them, and the other potential paths. Amazingly, the SND Controller can failover to alternate paths even faster than the fastest converging of routing protocols. Perhaps this is not fair since the SDN Controller does have to worry about notifying other devices and computing best paths.

Are there various controller options for the various SDN solutions out there? You bet there are! For example:

  • Cisco Systems – the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC)
  • Hewlett Packard – the HP Virtual Application Networks (VAN) SDN Controller
  • NEC – the NEC ProgrammableFlow PF6800 Controller
  • VMware  – the VMware NSX Controller
  • OpenDaylight – the OpenDaylight open source SDN controller
  • OpenContrail – the OpenContrail SDN controller
  • Many, many more!

Notice that you will have choices between commercial and an open source controller. Today we find that most operational SDN deployments use a mixture of vendor-sponsored projects.

Keep in mind that there are some common requirements that all SDN controllers should meet. For example, all controllers should support features such as the OpenFlow protocol. This is because this is a common method for southbound application programming interfaces (APIs) to their switches.

Pearson Education (InformIT)

CCIE Evolving Technologies – OpenStack Components

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Enjoy this latest installment of free training on the Evolving Technologies section of every CCIE written exam!

CCIE Evolving Technologies

OpenStack Overview

OpenStack is open source software that is designed to control your public or private cloud environment. The idea behind it is to relatively easily automate and manage your compute, network, storage , and security resources in a virtualized environment.

OpenStack runs on many of the Linux distributions. It is built of components for controlling the various aspects of your cloud. As you can see from our topic, these components and their purpose if the main point of this section of your evolving technologies blueprint.

OpenStack Components

Some of the main ideas behind OpenStack are the ability to add new capabilities through components and to use open standards. Here are some of the components currently in existence:

  • Nova – This component is to host, provision, and manage virtual machines. This is the compute component of the OpenStack solution. It functions with all kinds of hypervisors like EXSi and Hyper-V to orchestrate various hypervisors seamlessly using APIs.
  • Neutron – This component provides an API to dynamically request virtual networks. While the primary focus is on Layer 2, extensions exist to provide many other services. You can equate this component to roughly that of the Nexus 1000V.
  • Swift – This component provides a REST-based API to provide a distributed object storage system. This is very useful for backups and the storage of unstructured data.
  • Cinder – This component is all about providing block storage. The most common scenario it to provide storage to virtual machines. The actual physical storage might be provided thanks to iSCSI, NFS, or Fibre Channel.
  • Horizon – this is the GUI dashboard element for controlling other components.
  • Heat – this is the OpenStack orchestration program. The idea here is to be able to control the entire lifecycle of infrastructure and applications through text-based templates.
  • Ironic – This is the OpenStack component that provides Bare Metal Services, this enable users to manage and provision physical machines.

Cisco Integration

How might Cisco integrate with something like OpenStack? One example is how Cisco developed an open source plug-in for OpenStack Neutron that allows OpenStack tenants to transparently configure and manage a network based on Cisco ACI.

Cisco CCIE Lab Builder