Physical Switch recommendations for SDN / OpenFlow Lab?

[Fairlight]

Hi all

I am hoping someone can give me some advice on a cheap (ish) eBay sourced switch that I could add to my SDN / OpenFlow lab. I already have the Cisco CSR1000V, Juniper vSRX etc but I really wanted to add some physical hardware into the mix that supports OpenFlow and if possible VTEP / VXLAN (although I think this would add considerable dollar to the price of what was supposed to be cheap-"ish").

My lab is being geared up to revolve around:

VMware NSX (not just inside VMware but I wanted to expand it outside, hence VXLAN)

Cisco onePK

HP VAN SDN / OpenDaylight etc

OpenFlow

Unfortunately I need to source this switch from the UK (eBay), at the moment the cheapist option I could find was the HP 3500YL but there is no support for VXLAN on that switch (but OpenFlow is supported), it would be nice if this switch also had 10GbE support too which this one has, any other options? What about the Quanta LB4M did anyone get OpenFlow working with that?

Thanks

 

[jtreble]

I am hoping someone can give me some advice on a cheap (ish) eBay sourced switch that I could add to my SDN / OpenFlow lab ...

Fairlight,

I'm not sure I understand your requirements/setup well enough: why not just use OVS + 10GbE NICs that support VXLAN?

 

[mrkrad]

HP 2920-48 is what I use - it is SDN compatible , in theory!

 

[Scott Laird]

I don't think anyone has managed to get OpenFlow firmware onto any of the cheap LB4s. It's probably possible, but you'd have to flash the chips yourself or do *something* to make an end-run around the bootloader that's installed on them.

Also: what do you want to do with OpenFlow (besides VXLAN)? Just because a switch says 'OpenFlow Compatible" doesn't mean that it actually implements more than a bare subset of the features in OpenFlow. Huge swaths of the spec are optional and mostly depend on hardware support in the switching chips.

 

[jtreble]

Just because a switch says 'OpenFlow Compatible" doesn't mean that it actually implements more than a bare subset of the features in OpenFlow. Huge swaths of the spec are optional and mostly depend on hardware support in the switching chips.

+1.