Re: Need help with Stratum for SD-Fabric reference architecture
Charles Chan
I am moving Ain and help@onf to Bcc, and adding sdfabric-dev list.
Please find my comments inline.
Thanks,
Hi Charles,
Thanks for the immediate response.
Below is a brief text to elaborate on what we are trying to achieve and where we are stuck:
Our lab environment is currently only Virtual instances running on NUCs. We are yet to place a purchase order for the switches. Meanwhile until we receive the switches needed as leaf and spine , I have decided to start working on Virtual switches.
For the same we have installed stratum bmv2 on the virtual instances. We have gone through the tutorials as well ( not the Using P4 and Programmable Switches to Implement a 4G/5G UPF in Aether as we have not yet come to the stage of looking into Aether
and SD-Fabric Docs 1.0.2 documentation is something new and useful that I am reading now ). The hands on tutorial to learn building blocks of the next gen SDN architecture has exercises and environment where the complete topology is realised with Mininet.
(Additionally I have worked on understanding P4 programming last year and have done a lab demo internally how things work with P4 with BMV2 vswitch)
Now for the SD-Fabric architecture we started with stratum first and instead of having multiple leafs and spines in Mininet, we wanted to do something with each virtual instance acting as a leaf or spine and setting up the environment .
We also have further questions regarding using fabric.p4 program for the use case demo. As we are not a product company and this not a production environment , can we directly use this p4 program .
- fabric.p4 is an early open source v1model implementation we discontinued to maintain.
- We have ported that to fabric-v1model.p4 in fabric-tna repo
The latter one was member-only, but we are transitioning it to open source recently. Hopefully everything will settle in 2 weeks and we will make an official announcement. Once that happens, you can use it almost however you want (only subject to Apache 2.0 license).
I am not sure if we have separated documentation for running fabric-v1model.p4. I will defer that to Carmelo and others on the list.
We were able to install the virtual bmv2 switch setup, could connect it to ONOS , also add match-action entries to the table via the p4runtime shell using basic p4 programs. Individually it is all fine but we fail to see the complete picture in terms of connecting the virtual switches,
mainly the netcfg.json file required for the ONOS and connectivity setup.
You will need some additional configuration for that, which is described in https://docs.sd-fabric.org/master/advanced/connectivity/dual-homing.html#paired-tors.
Attached are topology pictures giving more details about the current setup, so the question is “ are we proceeding in the right way , can we achieve this by building step by step on virtual instances or is it only possible to have this tried on the white box switches?”
Regards,
Madhuri
Madhuri Akella
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From: Charles Chan <cha...@opennetworking.org>
Sent: 16 February 2022 02:41
To: Madhuri Akella <m.ak...@reply.de>
Cc: Carmelo Cascone <car...@opennetworking.org>; he...@opennetworking.org
Subject: Re: Need help with Stratum for SD-Fabric reference architecture
Hi Madhuri,
It's nice to get in touch with you and we are definitely happy to help. Can you elaborate on the issues and challenges you are facing?
Meanwhile, I am attaching a few resources that might help you understand SD-Fabric a bit more.
- SD-Fabric Techinar (Jul 2021)
- Using P4 and Programmable Switches to Implement a 4G/5G UPF in Aether
- Hands-on tutorial to learn the building blocks of the Next-Gen SDN architecture
- SD-Fabric Docs 1.0.2 documentation
Thanks,
Charles Chan, Ph.D.
Member of Technical Staff, Open Networking Foundation
On Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 12:44 AM Madhuri Akella <m.ak...@reply.de> wrote:
Dear ONF,
I am Madhuri Akella working as senior consultant in telecom domain with Reply AG.
Our company Reply AG is a member of ONF group and we are one of the development partners for Access 4.0, a DT(Deutsche Telekom) project in Germany.
Internally in our Dusseldorf (Germany) office , we are trying to build a lab to enhance/showcase our capabilities in disaggregated network domain to our clientele.
For one of the focus areas , we started working on Stratum taking into consideration the reference architecture of SD-Fabric and have issues with connecting the blocks.
Appreciate if we could get some help here in realising the reference model and also to get connected to discuss more on what we do and how we both can get benefitted out of the ecosystem.
Regards,
Madhuri Akella
Madhuri Akella
Live Reply
Hansaallee 299
40549 - Düsseldorf - GERMANY
phone: +49 211 339905-0
mobile: +49 1525 7907752
m.ak...@reply.de
www.reply.de
