State of Openflow

Could we please have a general statement about openflow?

  • When is a stable V1.3 likely to be available?
  • When is any kind of hardware switching likely to be available?
  • When are encrypted connections likely to be available?

All the described features are in our todo list, thank you for raising the questions. At the moment there is no specific timeframe, when features will be available.

I’ve been working with openflow since since the very early days, ~2009. I recently picked up some Mikrotik gear to start replacing a lot of old pfsense stuff. I’d like to start using the OpenFlow offering, but would really like to see something newer than 1.0.
How is OpenFlow being implemented? Is it OVS based?
Is there any possibility of adding a modern OpenvSwitch build to Mikrotik RouterOS? The benefits of this seem pretty obvious to me (although admittedly I am biased). Allowing for OpenFlow 1.3 would be pretty nice, even if it is just the required options to support the standard. I can help with the implementation and testing if that is a possibility. Again, I’m pretty new to RouterOS and don’t have the best communication paths, so if there are better places to ask I’m happy to do so.

Even I’m in search of some place to learn how to configure routerboard openflow. I have rb750gl with routeros 6.32.3. If you had found any place, kindly ping me. thanking you.

I didn’t find a config guide, I just worked it out myself. I’ve been using OpenFlow since 2009 so it wasn’t unfamiliar. I’m willing to write up a guide if folks are interested, but the bulk of the work isn’t in routerOS, it’s the controller.
If you’re interested in what it’s like running SDN in produiction, I can offer a podcast I did with Ivan Pepelnjak where we discuss the OpenFlow based network I ran at a large scientific conference.It’s available here

Off the top of my head, I think the setup commands are something like

/openflow add controllers=10.69.69.69 comment="This is my OpenDaylight Controller"
/openflow set name="OpenFlow CloudRouter"
/openflow set datapath-id=c0:ff:ee:c0:ff:ee
/openflow port add interface=ether1,ether2,ether3
/openflow port add interface=vlan_69

There may be a few more bits, but you get the idea. The rest of the work is on the controller. FWIW, I think there is a lot of value using OpenFlow as a control protocol for broadband provisioning, I’ve written up many opinion pieces on the subject. if you just search for my name and OpenFlow you can probably find them if you’re so inclined.

nb

+1 to implement newer versions of OpenFlow…SDN is getting to be more and more mainstream and this would put MIkroTik in a great position to be a low cost SDN router.

I’d love to seen an update on this. Anyone?

Anyone ever succeeded in connecting with a controller? I’ve setup a simple Openflow switch on my mikrotik 2011L routerboard. So far I’ve tried connecting with opendaylight and with pox, without any success.

Thanks for any pointer,

Dirk

Hi Dirk,
I’ve got a similar setup running, with success. I’m using a RB2011UiAS-2HnD, and a VM on my desktop running Ubuntu 14.04 with Opendaylight (ODL).
I installed / configured Dlux and L2switch features on ODL conform the manual. Furthermore i installed Wireshark 2.2.1 on the VM to get some insight in the traffic.

The RB was made factory default, and i added an IP address 192.168.10.251 on the first ethernet interface. This interface is going to be used for the communications to the ODL server (with IP address 192.168.10.26). This is connected to my home network (192.168.10.0/24 and sort of out of band network for Openflow).
The other interfaces of the RB are configured as Openflow interfaces, in an isolated network.
I connected two nodes to these Openflow interfaces, and after the ODL server was running, the flows were installed on the RB and the nodes could ping each other.
(i put in a DHCP server on an old router to provide IP adresses on one of the Openflow interfaces).

It is a pitty that the RB doesn’t yet support a higher Openflow version, the functionality is quite limited. I’m looking into the possibility of running Opeflow on a OpenWRT instance in the RB, to see if that can support something like Openflow 1.3. Hopefully Mikrotik will provide an update to openflow support on the RB.

i included my config below. It is quite straight forward. Maybe this helps.

With kind regards,
Mark

[admin@MikroTik] > export

oct/19/2016 14:54:36 by RouterOS 6.37.1

/interface bridge
add admin-mac=4C:5E:0C:xx:xx:xx auto-mac=no name=bridgeLocal
/openflow
add controllers=192.168.10.26 datapath-id=1/00:00:00:00:00:AA disabled=no
name=oflow1 passive-port=1
/interface bridge port
add bridge=bridgeLocal interface=ether2
add bridge=bridgeLocal interface=ether3
add bridge=bridgeLocal interface=ether4
add bridge=bridgeLocal interface=ether5
add bridge=bridgeLocal interface=ether6
add bridge=bridgeLocal interface=ether7
add bridge=bridgeLocal interface=ether8
add bridge=bridgeLocal interface=ether9
add bridge=bridgeLocal interface=ether10
add bridge=bridgeLocal interface=sfp1
/interface wireless cap

set bridge=bridgeLocal discovery-interfaces=ether1 enabled=yes interfaces=
wlan1
/ip address
add address=192.168.10.251/24 interface=ether1 network=192.168.10.0
/ip dhcp-client
add dhcp-options=hostname,clientid disabled=no interface=ether1
/openflow port
add disabled=no interface=ether2 switch=oflow1
add disabled=no interface=ether3 switch=oflow1
add disabled=no interface=ether4 switch=oflow1
add disabled=no interface=ether5 switch=oflow1
add disabled=no interface=ether6 switch=oflow1
add disabled=no interface=ether7 switch=oflow1
add disabled=no interface=ether8 switch=oflow1
add disabled=no interface=ether9 switch=oflow1
add disabled=no interface=ether10 switch=oflow1
/system clock
set time-zone-name=Europe/Amsterdam

Any news about OpenFlow 1.3 or higher?

My guess is that since OpenFlow has mostly being leveraged in datancenters and enterprise networks that at this point that the ROS offering is dying a slow, uneventful death.

Please MikroTik staff, any news about OpenFlow 1.3 or higher? I only need a date: 2018, 2019, 2020, … SDN is here and we need to know if we can go forward with MikroTik or change to another manufacturer. Thanks.

Any update? If this is ever going to happen it needs to meet a handful of requirements to be usable, most of which are not well documented. For reference, the faucet foundation has a set of tests that hardware needs to pass to conform to an actual useful implementation of OF 1.3 (multi table support being a hard requirement that many vendors happily ignore). If using OVS as a base, full implementation of >2.1 should work. See https://github.com/faucetsdn/faucet for more details.
I am very, very happy to test this out and provide useful feedback however is useful.

++1 for OpenFlow support specifically 1.3 !!!

Any update about Openflow 1.3 implementation ?

Given the push into 40 Gbps QSFP+ equipment, i assume MT is taking aim at enterprise and datacenter customers. With that in mind can we expect to see development work on the Openflow implementation?