Software-Defined Networking

OpenDaylight Updates SDN Controller, Network Functions Virtualization Platform

• By David Ramel
• 09/20/18

The OpenDaylight Project has rolled out the ninth major update of its software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) platform. The platform provides an open source SDN controller for enterprise networking implementations and, in its latest release, adds new functionality, improves stability and expands scalability.

The platform release — named Fluorine — was made by the OpenDaylight Project, part of open source champion The Linux Foundation.

The project evolved from the young and growing SDN movement, emphasizing network programmability and positioning itself as a foundational platform for commercial solutions.

According to the project, adoption of the platform in those commercial solutions is picking up pace. Citing "ongoing industry momentum," the project noted OpenDaylight is the primary controller platform used by Globo.com, a Brazilian Internet-related services and platform. The project also noted inclusion in other implementations, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform (OSP) version 13.

With Fluorine, such implementations are reportedly easier, the project said, simplified by easier packaging to quicken the development of solutions.

"Fluorine is one of the most streamlined releases to date for OpenDaylight, delivering a core set of mature components needed for most major use cases in a 'managed release' for easy consumption by commercial and in-house solution providers, as well as by downstream projects such as ONAP and OpenStack," said Phil Robb, vice president, Operations, Networking, and Orchestration, The Linux Foundation, in a statement last week.

In addition to the new managed release process, Fluorine reportedly has improved stability and scale, with many fixed bugs and better clustering capability.

Other functionality improved for key SDN use cases spans WAN connectivity, optical transport, cloud/edge computing, and service function chaining (SFC). Specifically, the project detailed each of those:

• Fluorine includes a mature and robust Border Gateway Protocol(BGP) stack, with improvements in BGPCEP and BGP/MPLS multicast support, reportedly making OpenDaylight a leader in SD-WAN innovation.
• Work on optical transport, including the TransportPCE project, has been nurtured within OpenDaylight for some time. Fluorine formally releases Transport PCE for the first time, as a component of the managed release. In addition, Fluorine provides a new reference implementation for OpenROADM-based optical infrastructures control.
• Several new features were added to further enhance support for network virtualization within cloud and edge computing environments. This includes improved IPv6 support, support for both stateful and stateless security groups, and SR-IOV hardware offload for OVS. Much of this work has been developed for OpenStack environments, and is now being leveraged to integrate ODL with the Container Orchestration Engine for Kubernetes environments.
• Updates to SFC accelerate delivery of services like network slicing, now supported by OpenvSwitch (OVS), allowing for improved adoption of SFC in the marketplace.

OpenDaylight also reported it's continuing to integrate with other open source projects, including OpenStack, a cloud computing platform; Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV); Kubernetes, a container orchestration platform; and Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP), an open source networking project hosted by The Linux Foundation.

Further details can be found at opendaylight.org.