Who will be the first to promote it?  Will it be via hardware or simply an application of network virtualization?  Because it will happen.

While some whole heartedly believe in not connecting sites with ANY type of layer 2, and I actually am a bigger believer in that now than I used to be, customers still ask and “require” this occasionally – namely for workload mobility.  Any answer I get or anything I read does not actively promote using an overlay such as VXLAN between data centers.  The responses are usually around 1. BUM traffic control 2. ARP localization 3. Traffic Trombone (since only one active default gateway) 4. STP isolation.  If you want to know all of the typical responses, look at the benefits of OTV.  But again, in a world that will soon be eaten by software, why can’t a viable solution be developed for L2 DCI with overlays?

Reflecting back and writing about my first Interop as I wait to board a sweet red eye home to go straight into the city for a full day SDN session with Cisco is livin’ the dream, I say.

It was a short trip, but action packed from the keynote sessions, breakout sessions, and private sessions set up for some of us bloggers.  I also somehow ended up in two Tech Field Day sessions as well.  A big thanks to Ivy Worldwide and HP for bringing us out here.   It was definitely interesting being at Interop as a blogger because we (about 6 of us) had some great access to HP product management, technical marketing, and executive team members.  The group I was in also had the opportunity to sit down and have a Q&A with Bethany Mayer, SVP & GM of Networking at HP.  Technology aside, they were a great group of people to talk with.  For the ones I actually got to talk to for more than 2 minutes (of course, about SDN) listened and asked plenty of questions as I did back to them.  I sincerely felt they wanted to solicit feedback on their solutions to further improve them.  On that note, they did have some big announcements this week.

There have already been a few great write ups of how to get OpenDaylight up and running. I referenced a few of them during my journey --- see links at bottom.  This post also covers getting the controller installed, but I wanted to share some of the issues I ran into during the install process.  It wasn’t 100% clean and smooth, but since I’m no expert in Linux, they were probably user errors.  I hope this helps others out that go down this path and run into similar issues.  I also run through some basics in Linux to aid others like myself that have been primarily users of Windows and the Cisco CLI.