Cloud And IoT

This site has been moved to  https://cloudifynetwork.com/       In the SDN primer blog post, we touched upon the basic building blocks of SDN. In this post we will try to outline how an ideal controller should look like taking a high level look at the SDN controller architecture. Please note that this is just a high level schema and a lot can be implementation specific. We will try to go through some examples as well. As shown in the above figure, SDN spans multiple layers. Given below is a snippet of the different layers which forms the SDN. Forwarding Plane - Handles the packets in the data plane based on instructions from the control plane. The forwarding plane can decide if the packet has to be dropped, if not which next hop to send or at what priority the packet should be sent out etc. Operational Plane - Manages the operational state of the network device. For example, whether the device is active or inactive, the numbe...

This site has been moved to  https://cloudifynetwork.com/ Software Defined Networking or SDN  is defined as the physical separation between network control plane and user plane. This architecture decouples the network control and forwarding functions enabling the network control to become directly programmable and the underlying infrastructure to be abstracted for applications and network services. The basic building blocks of a SDN based solution will have the above layers. The infrastructure layer or the networking layer which will have all the switches and routers. This could be physical or virtual devices. The control layer which will have all the SDN controllers. This can be virtual machine or installed on an entire x86 server. The application layer which will have the applications written by application developers which will interact with SDN controllers over what is called as Northbound APIs. As the original definition of SDN sugges...

This site has been moved to  https://cloudifynetwork.com/ A VNF manager manages the state, lifecycle and resources of one or more VNFs. It is responsible for instantiation, update, query, scaling, healing, termination etc of the VNFs. VNF Descriptor ( VNFD) The deployment and operational behaviour of each VNF is stored in a VNF Descriptor file ( VNFD). It contains information such as VNF Version: Version of VNF, which can be used later to enable upgrades and bug fixes Network connectivity: Service Chaining - If there are some VNFs that need to be started in particular order to provide a service to an application, that information can be stored in the VNFD. For e.g. say starting MME VNF before SGW , PGW and configure network connectivity only between MME-SGW and SGW-PGW but not MME-PGW Type of virtual links and QoS to be supported Deployment Flavor: How many CPUs, Cores, Threads, memory etc should be provided to this VNF Polici...

This site has been moved to  https://cloudifynetwork.com/ The NFV Orchestrator or NFVO has two primary responsibilities Resource Orchestration: Resource Orchestration refers to the management of virtualised and non-virtualised resources in the Network Functions Virtualisation Infrastructure (NFVI). It will basically oversee the allocation of resources and monitor the allocated resources used by the services. Virtualised Resources include: Compute Resources Resources such as CPU and Memory which could be retrieved from a host or bare metal or from a Virtual machine. Storage Resources Network Resources Resources such as networks, ports, subnets, forwarding rules etc needed for intra and inter VNF communications. Non Virtualised Resources are restricted to providing connectivity between the Physical Network Functions ( PNF) and VNF and when a VNF is distributed between physical and virtual resources. Network Service Orchestr...

This site has been moved to  https://cloudifynetwork.com/ NFVI - Network Functions Virtualisation Infrastructure NFVI Consists of all resources required to gain virtualisation. NFVI can span across many locations, e.g. a part of the infrastructure could be in city A and another at city B to enable geo-redundancy. A location where NFVI node is deployed is called NFVI-PoP ( NFVI Point of Presence). NFVI-PoP may contain one or more NFVI nodes and network elements. VNFs can be in the same or different NFVI-PoPs. It includes Hardware Resources CPU, Memory ( RAM ), Storage, Routers, Switches, Cables and all kinds of hardwares. It will also include hardware to provide security, encryption and decryption, packet switching, accelerated packet forwarding etc. Virtualisation Layer Virtualisation Layer consists for hypervisors like esxi, kvm, xen etc . The hypervisor has complete  control over the physical hardware resources and abstract them for the Vi...