Introduction

OpenDaylight is an open source project aiming to be a common tool across the networking industry - for enterprises, service providers, and manufacturers. It provides a highly available, multi-protocol infrastructure geared at building and managing software-defined networking deployments. Based on a Model Driven Service Abstraction Layer, the platform is extensible and allows users to create applications to communicate with a wide variety of south-bound protocols and hardware.

In other words, OpenDaylight is a framework used to solve networking-related use cases in both software-defined networking and network function virtualization domains.

To download the OpenDaylight software, select the Beryllium-SR4 release available at this link:

https://www.opendaylight.org/downloads

Download the ZIP or the tarball, and once extracted, get into that folder through the command line, and you are ready to play with the recipes.

The recipes in this chapter will present fundamental use cases that one can solve using OpenDaylight.

A common and widely used network emulator, Mininet, is going to be required to perform various recipes within this book.

Prior to any recipe, as a requirement, you will need a running version of Mininet. To achieve this, please follow the steps explained in the Mininet documentation:

http://mininet.org/download/