Tag Archives: ccie

CCIE Evolving Technologies – SDN Controllers

CCIE General, , ,

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)

The Modular Quality of Service CLI (MQC) Review – Policy Maps

QoS, , ,

Ant_Keith_QoS

In the first part of the MQC review – we examined class maps. These devices place our traffic into containers that we can assign QoS actions to. In this article, we are going to look at policy maps for assigning those actions.

Here I will create a quick class map, verify the class map, and then enter policy map configuration mode:

R1(config)#class-map match-any CM_ICMP
R1(config-cmap)#match access-group 100

R1(config-cmap)#exit
R1(config)#exit

R1#! The access-list 100 is not shown in this configuration
R1#show class-map
 Class Map match-any class-default (id 0)
   Match any 
 Class Map match-any CM_ICMP (id 1)
   Match access-group  100 
R1#conf t
R1(config)#policy-map PM_ICMP
R1(config-pmap)#?
Policy-map configuration commands:
  class        policy criteria
  description  Policy-Map description
  exit         Exit from policy-map configuration mode
  no           Negate or set default values of a command
  rename       Rename this policy-map
R1(config-pmap)#

As you can see from the above configuration, there is not much going on in policy map configuration mode. We can add a description or rename the policy map but that is about it. The magic happens when we enter policy map class configuration for one of the classes that we configured: Continue reading The Modular Quality of Service CLI (MQC) Review – Policy Maps →