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Setup OmniUI with UDS

Mininet

Mininet is a network simulator, running real kernel, switch, and application code. It is useful for developing, teaching, and research. You can simply manipulate the entire virtual network by command line interface or programming API.

Download Mininet virtual machine image from Mininet’s official website. Then import the uzipped image to your VMware, VirtualBox, etc. Using account/password both are “mininet” to login into the black box, weeeeee!

OmniUI

OmniUI is a diagnosis, analytic, and management framework for Software-Defined Networks. It provides graphical user interface to illustrate information of flows, devices and statistic data. Features of OmniUI includes:

  • Compatible with various controller
  • Forwarding path of specific flow
  • Topology view with traffic information
  • Statistic data of specific flow
  • Statistic data of specific port/link
  • Dynamic flow migration

OmniUI has three major components:

  • Web UI: self-explanatory
  • Core: provides many resources such as event registration, RESTful API registration and service, IPC (actually IMC, Inter Module Communication), etc.
  • Controller adapter: Per-controller application, to unify data format of various types of controller.

More details please refer to the GitHub page of OmniUI.

To install OmniUI in your box, some dependency issues have to be solved first.

# apt-get install python-pip
# pip install Flask
# pip install Flask-Cors
# pip install pymongo

Using Git to clone the repository on GitHub. Then change the current branch to “dev” branch which contains User-Defined Statistics (UDS) feature.

git clone https://github.com/dlinknctu/OmniUI.git
cd OmniUI && git checkout dev

Trema-Edge

Trema is a full-stack, easy-to-use framework for developing OpenFlow controllers in Ruby and C. But Trema currently supports OpenFlow version 1.0 only. However, OmniUI implements UDS using multiple table feature provided by OpenFlow version 1.3.

To resolve this situation, one workaround is using Trema-Edge as OmniUI’s controller. Trema-Edge is the bleeding-edge of Trema, written in C but also has a release of Ruby version. Currently, it supports OpenFlow 1.3 only.

git clone https://github.com/trema/trema-edge.git

This repository has only been tested with ruby 2.0.0 and will not work with 1.8.x. So the Ruby Version Manager (RVM) will be your good friend if don’t want to mess up your ruby environment. Install RVM for better ruby and packages management:

gpg --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys D39DC0E3
\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
echo "source $HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" >> ~/.bash_profile

Then re-login you will have rvm on the go. Use rvm help to see the commands available. Before building the controller, some dependencies have to be resolved.

# apt-get install gcc make libpcap-dev libssl-dev
$ gem install bundler
$ bundle install
$ rake

Adapter for Trema-Edge From OmniUI

Install the packages required by Trema-Edge adapter:

  • pkg-config
  • json-c
# apt-get install pkg-config
$ git clone https://github.com/json-c/json-c.git
$ cd json-c
$ sh autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install

The controller adapter of Trema-Edge provided by OnmiUI resides in ~/OmniUI/adapter/trema/uds. Just copy them into the directory of Trema-Edge. Then build the UDS application.

cp -R ~/OmniUI/adapter/trema/uds ~/trema-edge/
cd ~/trema-edge/uds
make

After the UDS application was built, run the controller along with our UDS application:

cd ~/trema-edge
./trema run uds/src/uds

Trema listens on port 6653. Now use Mininet to populate desired virtual network.

# mn --controller=remote,port=6653 --topo=tree,2

At this time, the connection between any two hosts will still not work. Because the switches (OVS) couldn’t understand OpenFlow 1.3 protocol. They cannot communicate with the controller.

OVS with OpenFlow 1.3

Trema-Edge controller is compatible with OpenFlow 1.3 switch. To turn mininet’s OVS to support OpenFlow 1.3, we need to configure all the OVS spawn by mininet.

# ovs-vsctl show | grep Bridge | awk -F "\"" '{print $2}' | xargs -i  ovs-vsctl set bridge {} protocols=OpenFlow10,OpenFlow12,OpenFlow13

That’s all.

References