SDN-Load-Balancer

Purpose:

Demonstrate the performance hit of L2 and L3 header rewrites in a typical software defined networking load balancer.

Getting the lab up:

• git clone into $HEAD
• mkdir $HEAD/images
• Resulting directory tree:

  $HEAD/
    images/
    scripts/

• Obtain any Red Hat based Linux distribution (Tested on Fedora)
• Create an image out of it called VM_Template.qcow2 and place it in the images folder
• Ensure that startupScript.sh is executed on the VM template boot up
• Construct a topology so that two Fedora hosts are connected via an Ethernet cable
• On the VMs host (Henceforth known as the host) execute:

    vSwitchUp.sh  <2>
    vmPool.sh <2>

• On the other machine (Known as the traffic generator) execute:

    trafficUp.sh

At this point you should be able to ping 1.1.1.1 from the traffic generator machine. The first VM will answer you. If you fake the traffic from 1.1.1.101 (Instead of 1.1.1.100) you will get an answer from the second VM.

• The installed flows can be viewed on the host via:

    ovs-ofctl dump-flows

Reproducing the results:

• On the traffic generator machine, run:

    ovs-benchmark rate -r 1.1.1.1 -s 1021 -T 600
    ovs-benchmark latency -r 1.1.1.1 -s 1021 -b 10000

For a duration of 10 minutes.

• To get the results with header rewrites, you'll need to close the VMs and execute on the host:

    addFlowsRewrite.sh
    vmPoolRewrite.sh

• Edit both of the new VMs (VM1_Rewrite, VM2_Rewrite) and reconfigure their IPs and MACs to 1.1.1.11, 02:00:00:00:00:01 and 1.1.1.12, 02:00:00:00:00:02 respectively
• Re-run ovs-benchmark on the generator

License:

SDN-Load-Balancer Copyright (C) 2013 Assaf Muller & Noam Slomianko

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.