This week Guru Parulkar and I (Guido Appenzeller) will visit the seven Universities that are part of the GENI OpenFlow Campus Trials that are taking place this year. The reason why we will spend the week mostly in planes, cars and meetings with IT folks is that we feel we don’t fully understand yet what it will take to deploy OpenFlow at these universities. It is one thing to read a proposal or listen to a 30 minute presentation at a conference, but a very different thing to actually talk to the people who will have to deploy and support the hardware and software that will run production traffic.

Unless the winter weather stops us, we will within five days visit:

• Rutgers
• Princeton
• GeorgiaTech
• Clemson
• University of Indiana (Bloomington)
• University of Wisconsin at Madison
• Washington University

We hope to post a short update from each university while we are on the road, as well as an overall summary at the end. This should be interesting. Stay tuned.

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Today we are releasing version 1.0 of the OpenFlow Switch Specification as well as the OpenFlow Switch Reference Implementation. You can find it on the download page or pull it directly from the public git repository.

Unlike previous releases, OpenFlow 1.0 is the first release of the standard that we feel is ready to be implemented in generally available products. We have been running OpenFlow in our Stanford network over the past months, and it has proven itself for both production use as well as experimentation.

OpenFlow 1.0 adds a number of key features. The largest addition is Slicing, a simple QoS mechanism that allows the isolation of traffic in OpenFlow networks. Smaller changes include matching IP addresses in ARP packets, Flow Cookies to identify flows, selective port statistics and matching on the ToS bits in the IP header. The release also includes a large number of small changes to the specification and bug fixes in the reference implementation. For a complete list of changes read the Release Notes or the more detailed Wiki Page.

Hardware accelerated OpenFlow 1.0 capable switches are expected to become available over the next months and we will keep you updated on the OpenFlow Blog and the OpenFlow-Announce Mailing List. On the controller side the reference controller supports 1.0 and there is a version of NOX with partial support available. If you deploy OpenFlow 1.0, feedback and bug reports are highly welcome via Trac or the openflow-discuss mailing list.

This release would not have been possible without the work of (in alphabetical order) Guido Appenzeller, Peter Balland, Martin Casado, David Erickson, Glen Gibb, Brandon Heller, Mikio Hara, Bob Lantz, Masayoshi Kobayashi, Nick McKeown, Justin Pettit, Ben Pfaff, Rob Sherwood, Srini Seetharaman, Dan Talayco, Jean Tourrilhes, Tatsuya Yabe, KK Yap, Yiannis Yiakoumis as well as to the many other members of the OpenFlow community that provided valuable suggestions, feedback and testing.

Thanks to all of you!

Brandon, Glen and Guido

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We are pleased to announce the availability of release candidates for the OpenFlow 1.0 specification and reference switch.

The release candidates are being made available to provide the community with an opportunity to provide feedback prior to the official release. We plan on making the release official by the end of year (12/31) so please provide feedback before this date. Bugs reported in the reference software may not be corrected prior to the official release depending upon their severity; we plan to make a bug fix release in the new year that will address as many bugs as possible.

New features

New features added to the 1.0 specification include:

• Slicing support (multiple queues per port with minimum bandwidth guarantees)
• Matching on IP fields inside ARP packets
• Matching on IP ToS bits
• Improved flow duration resolution in stats/expiry
• Opaque flow cookies added to flows
• Ability to retrieve port stats for individual ports
• User-specifiable datapath description added to desc stats

The updated specification also includes numerous clarifications. For a more detailed list of changes please see the release notes (http://www.openflowswitch.org/wk/index.php/OpenFlow_1.0_release_notes) and the development wiki (http://www.openflowswitch.org/wk/index.php/OpenFlow_v1.0). Read the rest of this entry »

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