FlowVisor

From OpenFlow Wiki

This page has been moved to http://openflow.stanford.edu/display/flowvisor/Home and exists here for historical purposes only.

What

• FlowVisor is a special purpose OpenFlow controller that acts as a transparent proxy between OpenFlow switches and multiple OpenFlow controllers
• FlowVisor creates rich slices of network resources and delegates control of each slice to a different controller
  • Slices can be defined by any combination of switch ports (layer 1), src/dst ethernet address or type (layer 2), src/dst IP address or type (layer 3), and src/dst TCP/UDP port or ICMP code/type (layer 4).
• FlowVisor enforces isolation between each slice, i.e., one slice cannot affect another's traffic

Status

• FlowVisor is currently considered a research project quality and careful testing and consideration should be exercised before deploying in production networks.
• That said, FlowVisor has been deployed in Stanford's production network since May of 2009.

Download

• The preferred and most current source can be obtained direct from git repository:
  • git clone git://gitosis.stanford.edu/flowvisor.git

Documentation

• man pages are included for the fvctl, fvconfig, and fvctl commands
• Building, Installing and Deploying Instructions

Papers

• Can the Production Network Be the Test-bed?
  • Rob Sherwood, Glen Gibb, Kok-Kiong Yap, Guido Appenzeller, Martin Casado, Nick McKeown, Guru Parulkar
  • OSDI 2010
• FlowVisor Technical Report
  • Rob Sherwood, Glen Gibb, KK Yap, Guido Appenzeller, Nick McKeown, Guru Parulkar

• Carving Research Slices Out of Your Production Networks with OpenFlow
  • ACM Sigcomm 2009 Demo Abstract Best Demo Award
  • Rob Sherwood, Michael Chan, Glen Gibb, Nikhil Handigol,
    • Te-Yuan Huang,Peyman Kazemian, Masayoshi Kobayashi, David Underhill,
    • Kok-Kiong Yap, Guido Appenzeller, and Nick McKeown

Contact

• Report/Track a bug
• Discuss FlowVisor on the OpenFlow (general) mailing list

Authors

• Rob Sherwood
• Glen Gibb
• Srini Seetharaman
• Nick Bastin