Industry Scale SDX Controller (iSDX)

Installation: Vagrant Setup

Prerequisite

To get started install these softwares on your host machine:

1. Install Vagrant, it is a wrapper around virtualization softwares like VirtualBox, VMWare etc.: http://www.vagrantup.com/downloads

2. Install VirtualBox, this would be your VM provider: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

3. Install Git, it is a distributed version control system: https://git-scm.com/downloads

4. Install X Server and SSH capable terminal

   • For Windows install Xming and Putty.
   • For MAC OS install XQuartz and Terminal.app (builtin)
   • Linux comes pre-installed with X server and Gnome terminal + SSH (buitlin)

Basics

• Clone the iSDX repository from Github:

  $ git clone https://github.com/sdn-ixp/iSDX.git

• Change the directory to iSDX:

  $ cd iSDX

• Now run the vagrant up command. This will read the Vagrantfile from the current directory and provision the VM accordingly:

  $ vagrant up

The provisioning scripts will install all the required software (and their dependencies) to run the SDX demo. Specifically it will install:

• Ryu
• Quagga
• Mininet
• Exabgp

Usage

Run the different setups provided in the examples directory. Check out the test-ms example for a simple case with three IXP participants. Or, look at the test directory to experiment with the testing framework.

Directory Structure

The top level directories are:

• Source code:
  • pctrl - Participant Controller component
  • xctrl - Central Controller component (runs at startup to load initial switch rules)
  • arproxy - ARP Relay component
  • xrs - BGP Relay component
  • flanc - Fabric Manager component (a.k.a. 'refmon')
  • util - Common code
• examples - Working examples
• test - Test Framework and example tests
• visualization - Tools for visualizing iSDX flows
• setup - Scripts run from the Vagrantfile when the VM is created
• bin - Utility scripts

Running iSDX with Hardware Switches

Most of the examples on this site use Mininet as the underlying network.

Here is an example of iSDX running on hardware switches.