A Scalable Integrated SDN and OpenStack Management System

Abstract

Due to the need to agilely cope with more complex and virtualized applications, integrating Software-Defined Networking (SDN) switches and OpenStack software platform into the data center has becomes an important enabling technology. However, the SDN controller and OpenStack have their own management interface, such as Horizon, which may not be able to meet the user's requirement on managing both platforms in one data center. For example, although the deployment of switches of a data center usually follows a layering hierarchy, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of management system of the SDN controller, such as Ryu, shows the topology of switches in a random and messy manner. Furthermore, tightly integration of SDN and OpenStack is required for agile and real-time management. Thus, in this paper, we design and implement a management system which tightly integrates SDN and OpenStack. In the proposed management system, the topology displays SDN switches, Open vSwitches (OVS), as well as virtual machines in hierarchy of multi-rooted trees. In order to display millions of virtual machines and thousands of switches, the GUI of the proposed management system provides a scalable view for users to zoom in or zoom out the topology. The proposed management system adopts modular design and provides web-based user interface and RESTful API for interoperability. The prototype of the proposed management system is shown to demonstrate the usability and scalability of the proposed system.