The last three months, we presented variations of our Mobile VMs Demo at different venues including SIGCOMM 2008, GEC-3 and Supercomputing 2008.

We demonstrated Virtual Machine mobility, client mobility and GUI-based flow dragging, on a centrally controlled network spanning across Stanford, Internet 2 and JGN2plus in Japan.

This video gives Openflow basic background and explains the demo with slides, pictures and video clips.

Check it out!

Video is also available in a larger size and HD.

An article on OpenFlow titled “Programmable Flow Switch” was recently published in the Japanese magazine Nikkei NETWORK (Dec 2008 issue), one of the most read subscription based networking magazines in Japan.

The article appeared in the “New Face” section and introduced OpenFlow as a programmable flow switch technology that may be used for testing and experiments in future networking infrastructure.

OpenFlow version 0.8.9 has been released, with over 23 (!) new features and spec changes (see release notes on wiki).

The package is available on the downloads page, and the corresponding spec is on the documents page.  NetFPGA is not yet supported for this release, but will be soon.  Thanks goes to everyone who made this release possible!

Notable in this release:

• Spec improves consistency across multiple vendors
• More descriptive capability reporting
• IP subnetting capability
• 802.1D Spanning Tree

Enjoy!

The Stanford Experimental Wifi Deployment Team building Access Points

Just before thanksgiving the Wireless Deployment team put together 80 new wireless access points for a testbed at Stanford. These are PC Engines based APs that run the latest version of OpenFlow. The plan is to use them for mobility experiments as part of the POMI project, as well as mobility experiments done in Phil Levis’ group. Congratulations to Masayoshi Kobayashi and the whole team including Mayank, KK, TY, Michel, Peyman, Jiang, Nikhil, Brandon and Mikio (some of them pictured above).

OpenFlow made its latest appearance at the Internet2 booth for the 2008 Supercomputing convention in Austin, TX.  Adam Covington and David Underhill presented OpenFlow over four days to attendees from diverse backgrounds (industry, academia, and media) and diverse locations (Japan, Netherlands, and more).  We were able to show off our latest demo which included a VOIP phone in the OpenFlow network.  Attendees could place a call to the phone, see the flow to the phone show up in real-time, and then actually hear the latency of the echo as the flow was re-routed on the fly to go from Stanford to Japan, all over the US, and finally back.

To see photos from convention, go here — you will see the OpenFlow booth in action (along with our prime spot near the Network Operations Center)!

Two weeks ago we had a great demo of OpenFlow at the third GENI Engineering Conference. Things we demonstrated included:

• A centrally controlled OpenFlow network with OpenFlow switches deployed at Stanford, Internet2 and JGN2plus in Japan.
• Virtual machine mobility at Stanford. You can see this in detail in the SIGCOMM Demo Video.
• Flow Dragging. David Underhill created a fantastic UI that allows you to change the path packets take in the network by dragging the flow with the mouse to new routers an example video is shown below.
• Virtual machine mobility within JGN2plus and between Stanford and JGN2plus. A running virtual machine was migrated across the Pacific while hosts in Japan were communicating with it. The combination of OpenFlow and our controller allowed the virtual machine to change locations and maintain connectivity without changing IP address.

The demonstration OpenFlow network incorporated switches from (in alphabetical order) Cisco, HP, Juniper and NEC.

The slides for Nick’s talk before the demo are online here.

Thanks to Glen who was the technical lead on this demo, as well as to everyone else on the 30 person team from Stanford, HP, NEC, Internet2, Cisco and Juniper who made this a success.

Photo Gallery from the GEC Demo after the jump…

More press: Cracking Open Internet Hardware on Technology Review’s web site.  We haven’t seen any switches look like the one pictured… yet.

Tim Greene from Computerworld has a very nice article about OpenFlow, vendors that have implemented it and the demo at the GENI Engineering Conference. It is also up on Networkworld.

The GENI Demo just happened a few minutes ago, and it safe to say it was a huge success. We demostrated both virtual machine mobility as well as arbitrary flow routing. More exciting updates on OpenFlow coming soon.

Update: International coverage of OpenFlow in Japanese, Portuguese, Italias, Spanish, Polish and Swedish after the jump.

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Last August at SIGCOMM 2008, we presented a demo of OpenFlow where both game servers and clients could move around in a production network, while maintaining their connectivity to each other.

For anyone who missed the demo, or wants to share it with others, we’ve made a self-contained four-minute video that explains OpenFlow background and the demo - with slides, pictures, and video clips of those playing the game.  Check it out above, in web-size, or see it in 720p HD!

NEC today announced their participation in the GEC3 OpenFlow demo, and their intention to support OpenFlow going forward. Press releases are online in English and Japanese. The GEC OpenFlow demo includes several NEC Switches at Stanford as well as in JGN2plus in Tokyo. NEC has been instrumental in working with Stanford to make this demo happen across continents.

The NEC IP8800 switches used in the demo are some of the best OpenFlow hardware that currently exists. They offer a good fan-out and are able to do OpenFlow at line rates. The only bad news is that what we are using are prototypes and they are not available commercially. However to quote from the release:

“NEC plans to support OpenFlow features in its future products and  to encourage universities, public testbed projects, and researchers to  experiment with innovative network ideas. “

So far we have had fairly few details about OpenFlow capable hardware on this blog, but expect this to change in the future. If you are interested in OpenFlow hardware, feel free to get in touch with us.