Delftvisor

Delftvisor is an openflow hypervisor that works with openflow 1.3 leveraging the new features of openflow 1.3. It is a proof-of-concept implementation produced for a master thesis, its design is discussed in the thesis available from the TU Delft repository.

This project is currently unmaintained.

Project structure

• /src Contains all source code
• /configuration Contains some configuration examples
• /design Contains some design documents, the thesis in the TU Delft repository contains more details.

Building and running

This project uses cmake. Running the following commands in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS produces a delftvisor executable:

sudo apt-get install gcc cmake git libboost-all-dev autoconf mininet
git clone https://github.com/TUDelftNAS/Delftvisor.git
mkdir Delftvisor/build/
cd Delftvisor/build/
cmake ..
make

The Delfvisor executable is now at Delftvisor/build/src/delftvisor.

Running an experiment

If you have followed the instructions above you can run the following commands to perform the linear 4,2 experiment. Delftvisor is very much proof-of-concept software and has only been tested with controllers using the Ryu framework. Delftvisor has worked with a simple L2 router available at https://github.com/harmjan/l2-router.

• Run the command sudo mn --controller remote,ip=127.0.0.1 --switch ovsk,protocols=OpenFlow13 --mac --topo linear,4,2 in a separate terminal
• Run the command ./src/delftvisor -l info ../configuration/linear_4_2.json from the build directory
• Run the controllers on port 6653 and 6654 in separate terminals

The experiment is now running, you can type the pingall command in mininet to see which hosts can now see each other. You can bring down links in mininet to see how Delftvisor and the controllers react to it.

Missing features

The current implementation is missing a bunch of features making it not officially Openflow 1.3 compatible and not usable in a production environment. The following is in incomplete list of missing features:

• No statistics support, the multipart message is ignored
• No TLS support
• Roles and multiple connections are not properly supported
• Cannot change configuration while running Delftvisor
• No multi-threading
• No input validation on network packets, sending malformed Openflow packets will crash Delftvisor
• There are still known situations where Delftvisor crashes

License

This program is licensed under GPL V3, which can be found as the file COPYING in this directory.