SDDC: A Software Defined Datacenter Experimental Framework

Abstract

The rapid growth and the distributed sites of the datacenters increase the complexity of control and management processes. A new paradigm which is called Software Defined Systems (SDSys) comes as a solution to reduce the overhead of datacenters management by abstracting all the control functionalities from the hardware devices and setting it inside a software layer. These functionalities are responsible for organizing and controlling the main blocks of the datacenter; network, storage, compute and security. The Software Defined Datacenter (SDD) integrates the software defined concepts into all of these main blocks. Transferring these concepts into workable systems requires checking several performance aspects and testing its correctness before building real systems. In this paper we introduce a novel experimental framework (SDDC) to provide a novel virtualized testbed environment for SDD systems. This work builds on the Mininet simulator, where its core components, the host, the switch and the controller, are customized to build the proposed experimental simulation framework for SDD. This simulator lets the users develop and test their own SDD solutions, and at the same time gives the researchers an experimentation tool for benchmarking purposes. The developed simulator could also be used as an educational tool to train students and novice researchers.