[ovs-discuss] In-band comm with OF-only Switches

[Nicholas Bastin]

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 8:39 AM, <gavin_remaley at selinc.com> wrote:

> Has a general strategy been established for establishing initial in-band
> communication with OF-only Switches?


Do you mean OF-only OVS instances, or just OF-only switches in general?

For run-of-the-mill OF-only switches the strategy is a fairly simply
fan-out from the switch(es) your controller is connected to, slowly working
out to the edge of the network as you install rules in each switch along
the way to bring control packets back to your controller.

In an environment with no drops or failures it's completely trivial.  If
you encounter topology changes during the initial process it's a bit more
complex, but nothing too problematic.  More complexity can come into play
if you have OF-only devices that can't make a deep enough packet match to
discriminate control traffic from other traffic you'd like to treat
differently, but that's life.

--
Nick
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