Administrator Guide

1614 OpenFlow

This section covers the following topics:

• "Dell Networking OpenFlow Hybrid Principles of Operation " on page 1614

• "OpenFlow 1.0 Supported Flow Match Criteria, Actions and Status " on

page 1616

• "Port Configuration, Status and Statistics " on page 1643

• "Queue Configuration and Status " on page 1644

•

Dell Networking

OpenFlow Hybrid Supported OpenFlow messages and

options.

Dell Networking OpenFlow Hybrid Principles of Operation

The Dell Networking OpenFlow Hybrid OpenFlow implementation is

targeted for the data center market as opposed to the education market. As a

consequence of this design decision, some aspects of the OpenFlow 1.0/1.3

specifications are not supported, while extra features are added to enhance

the data center networking environment.

Key limitations are:

• A single bridge instance.

• A limited subset of supported flow actions.

• IPv4 and IPv6 flows cannot both be supported with iSCSI enabled on the

N4000. Disable iSCSI to support IPv4 and IPv6 flows simultaneously on

the N4000.

• The IPv6 destination address field is not supported on the N4000.

However, the IPv6 flow label is supported.

The Dell Networking OpenFlow Hybrid implements the following behaviors:

The switch behaves as an OpenFlow-Enabled Hybrid switch. This means

that the switch can forward OpenFlow and normal layer-2 and layer-3

traffic on the same ports and the same VLANs at the same time. When the

controller adds flows, the ports mentioned in the match criteria or egress

actions are automatically assumed to be OpenFlow ports, so the switch

disables ingress and egress filtering on those ports and allows the ports to

receive and transmit traffic for any VLAN. This change in the ingress and

egress filtering behavior may affect how the switch handles the non-

OpenFlow traffic on those ports.