Basic Bridge Introduction

This document provides instructions on how to configure open switches running Pica8 PicOS software in various application scenarios. This document assumes minimal to no knowledge of OVS (Open vSwitch) and OpenFlow.

After studying this document, user will be able to configure OpenFlow on PicOS switches, know how to optimize the configuration for an application environment, and understand more about Open vSwitch and OpenFlow.

This document provides instructions for completing the following tasks:

• Configuring a PicOS switch as an OVS/OpenFlow switch.
• Creating bridges, adding ports, displaying bridge and port status/statistics, and displaying the OVS database.
• Configuring flow tables for uni-directional traffic, bi-directional traffic, traffic switching, one-to-many multicasting, mirroring, filtering, many-to-one aggregation etc.
• Configuring PicOS switches to connect with the Ryu controller

Figure 1   Test bed configuration

In this document, the system configuration depicted in Figure 1 includes:

• A Pica8 P-3295 open switch with 48 x 1GbE and 4 x 10GbE uplinks
• 5 Linux PCs running Ubuntu 12.4.1 LTS, one is connected to the management LAN port (RJ45) and console port (RJ45F); this PC is referred to the controller PC. The OpenFlow controller will be running on this PC. Four PCs are connected to 1GbE port 1 to 4 and serve as a data terminal for generating and monitoring traffic
• Tools installed on all the PCs are listed below. They can be installed through Linux installation utility apt-get
  • Terminal emulator minicom
  • Traffic monitoring tool Wireshark
  • Packet generator Packeth
  • ftp and ftpd