Using FloodLight OpenFlow controller - Part 1: The Installation

After reading and hearing about OpenFlow I decided to get past the marketing material and start taking a closer look at the current products and how they work. This blog is a first installment of my working with the FloodLight controller.

The first question I had was how do I get this up and running? Shortly that question was followed by what do I do with it? So let me walk you through the steps I used to get FloodLight running.

1) Download the code, this is a link to floodlight-0.82.jar
2) Create a directory, I put it in ~/floodlight and copy the file floodlight-0.82.jar
3) Start the controller, java -jar floodlight-0.82.jar

NOTE: you will get a bunch of debug info printed when you start the controller as well as debug info when devices attach and queries are made to the controller I found all of this very helpful to understanding how the controller and client side agents interoperated.

Once that is done you have FloodLight up, running and ready to accept connections - no rocket science it was a very straight forward and easy install. Now time to get something to talk to the controller, even if you have an OpenFlow enabled switch then I recommend using mininet to get started and learn about how things work. I will get into how to interact with a virtual network provided via mininet and the controller via the REST API in my next couple postings...