Using the Brocade Vyatta Controller EMS App

As part of our continuing work for NetDEF, we continue to install, setup and test the latest SDN controller tools from companies such as Brocade.

The Brocade Vyatta Controller (BVC) v1.2 is based on OpenDaylight Helium SR2 (the current release is SR3) and comes enabled with certain features that are not enabled by default in OpenDaylight such as OpenFlow and a GUI interface.

For our testing we utilized BVC, a pair of Brocade Vyatta vRouter 5600s, and the Brocade vRouter 5600 EMS App for BVC.

In the diagram you can see that we have attached a 5600 to each of the OpenFlow switches.

We followed the installation documentation from Brocade without issue, first installing BVC 1.2, then adding the Path Explorer app and finally the 5600 EMS app.

Once installed you can log into the controller on port 9000 and you should see the following toolbar on the lefthand side

Note the addition of the Vyatta vRouter 5600 EMS link.  Clicking on the link gives you the following display:

Here you can see that we have already added the two vRouter 5600’s show in our diagram.  The main configuration change we needed to make on the vRouters was to enable netconf and add the netconf-ssh port of 830 to the configuration

We then selected the two vRouters (R1 and R2) and clicked on the “Create Tunnel” box and waited for about two minutes while the system built the tunnels.

Looking on the vRouters we saw the following configuration had been added

Obviously the pre-shared-secret being “vyatta” is a bit concerning but since we are aware of it, we can fix it manually.

The EMS app does exactly what it says it will do, configure tunnels between multiple vRouters.

One thing to note is that the EMS app is still limited, for example it does not allow us to configure which interfaces are used for the tunnel interfaces, configure a pre-shared-secret, etc.  We found the EMS app useful for creating the configurations for the vRouters that can be modified to fit your needs.

Also, just like the standard OpenDaylight dlux GUI, the Brocade GUI appears to still use the D3 gravity javascript code to display the network topology, which is pretty but can be hard to work with.

Thank you as always to Brocade and especially Lisa Caywood for being our contact and providing the software (BVC, vRouter 5600’s) necessary to do the testing.