Reflecting back and writing about my first Interop as I wait to board a sweet red eye home to go straight into the city for a full day SDN session with Cisco is livin’ the dream, I say.

It was a short trip, but action packed from the keynote sessions, breakout sessions, and private sessions set up for some of us bloggers.  I also somehow ended up in two Tech Field Day sessions as well.  A big thanks to Ivy Worldwide and HP for bringing us out here.   It was definitely interesting being at Interop as a blogger because we (about 6 of us) had some great access to HP product management, technical marketing, and executive team members.  The group I was in also had the opportunity to sit down and have a Q&A with Bethany Mayer, SVP & GM of Networking at HP.  Technology aside, they were a great group of people to talk with.  For the ones I actually got to talk to for more than 2 minutes (of course, about SDN) listened and asked plenty of questions as I did back to them.  I sincerely felt they wanted to solicit feedback on their solutions to further improve them.  On that note, they did have some big announcements this week.

There have already been a few great write ups of how to get OpenDaylight up and running. I referenced a few of them during my journey --- see links at bottom.  This post also covers getting the controller installed, but I wanted to share some of the issues I ran into during the install process.  It wasn’t 100% clean and smooth, but since I’m no expert in Linux, they were probably user errors.  I hope this helps others out that go down this path and run into similar issues.  I also run through some basics in Linux to aid others like myself that have been primarily users of Windows and the Cisco CLI.

Last year at ONS, Google announced they had built their own switches, OpenFlow controller, Traffic Engineering algorithms, and were using OpenFlow on their Wide Area Network links.  This year, Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist announced they are also using OpenFlow in their data centers, not just between them anymore.  So, what can’t Google do on their own and where could they use some help from the vendors out there?  This was a question asked to Amin Vahdat, Distinguished Engineer at Google, during a panel discussion during this year’s Open Networking Summit. 

After attending ONS last week, I will say there is some doubt on if the OpenDaylight Project (ODP) team can execute (not just about the project in general), but at the same time there is an increased amount of optimism from the SDN community.  I first posted about the ODP here when it launched and I can say I’m one of the optimists at this point.  Borrowing Omar Sultan’s LinkedIn headline, I’ll cautiously call myself a skeptical optimist.  You always need a bit of healthy paranoia/skepticism, don’t you?

Goldman Sachs, the only Enterprise that sits on the Board of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), had a key speaking slot at the 2013 Open Networking Summit in the “Software Defined Networking (SDN) for Enterprises” session.  Steve Schwartz, global head of Telecommunications and Market Data Services at GS, gave the presentation.  Highlights from this session include:

Bruce Davie, former Cisco Distinguished Engineer and now Principal Engineer in the Networking & Security Division of VMware via Nicira, did a pretty good job at confusing the audience this week at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) during his presentation.  While most other presenters talked about Network Virtualization as an application of Software Defined Networking (SDN), Davie wanted to state repeatedly they are different and that network virtualization is possible without SDN.  This is true, and unlike most vendors, he was actually trying not to SDN-wash.  Shouldn’t that be a good thing?  

Today marks the end of the first day at ONS 2013.  You had a choice to attend one of two tutorial sessions: one for engineers and one for market opportunities.  I chose to attend the engineering session mainly because I’ve done a lot of research around SDN and wanted some good quality time in front of the keyboard.

The session was comprised of hands-on labs and lectures.  

I recently had a good exchange with Brian Gracely after a comment I made on twitter in which I was asking where the industry is heading with more open source offerings being announced.  His response to my question can be found here.  Brian poses great questions to keep in mind as technologies and the related value chains continue to evolve.  Think from product acquisition, testing, to production deployments and day 2 support.  The value chain in IT could likely shift over the next few years, so it’s definitely worth the read.  The response was not expected, so thank you to Brian.  Very much appreciated.  I’d encourage all to have a read.

What sort of insight should the physical network fabric offer network operators when it comes to deploying network virtualization? It is a great question and the answer is really going to vary based on who answers it.  Martin Casado and co. recently voiced their perspective here.  As always, Martin’s blogs are a great read and I encourage you to follow him at NetworkHeresy if you aren't already, although there haven’t been many posts since the Nicira acquisition.  Looks like he is making it a community based blog going forward, so let’s hope to see more soon.

We know virtualization, server and network, offer a means of abstracting the underlying physical hardware.  Once the hardware is abstracted though, how much visibility should there be into the virtual networks or virtual servers?  

Have you heard of OpenFlow?  Have you heard of vPath?  Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about how they are related to each other when it comes to, yup, you guessed it --- Software Defined Networking (SDN).  

OpenFlow is one of the most widely talked about protocols in the world of SDN.  It is simply an *open* protocol that enables the separation of the control and data planes of a network device.  Most commonly, it is a protocol used between a controller and physical/virtual switch to remotely program device forwarding tables.

vPath on the other hand, isn’t as popular (yet?) and rarely discussed in SDN conversations, so what is it?