OpenDaylight Introduction

Owned by Tracy Yang
May 24, 2024
2 min read

This document provides instructions on how to configure Pica8's open switches to work in various application scenarios. This guide assumes the reader has minimal to no knowledge of the Open Virtual Switch (OVS) implementation defined by http://openvswitch.org/; or the OpenFlow protocol, defined by https://www.opennetworking.org/.  This guide will provide the tools required to configure Pica8's open switches as an OpenFlow switch. By reading this guide, user will gain insights on how to optimize the configuration to work in a specific application environment, while also learning about OVS and the OpenFlow protocol.


This starter kit provides screen shots and a list of off-the-shelf applications needed to complete the configuration, as well as tips on problems users may encounter during the setup. More documents or cookbooks on other subjects will be published periodically. This document provides a tutorial on how to:

  • Configure Pica8 as an OVS OpenFlow switch
  • Create bridges, add ports, show bridge and port statistics, status, and utilize the OVS database
  • Configure flow tables for uni-directional, bi-directional, traffic switching, one-to-many multi-casting, mirroring, filtering, many-to-one aggregation, etc.
  • Configure Pica8 OVS OpenFlow switches to interface with the OpenDaylight OpenFlow 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 1 GbE and 4 x 10 GbE 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 from 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

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