For those that aren’t aware, I was proudly in a fraternity in college and our motto was simple, “Loved, Hated, but Never Ignored,” and we wore it proudly on our fraternity t-shirts.  The same motto seems to be true for Software Defined Networks in the industry at this moment.  There is a community of folks that see the potential, but not everyone is on board, not everyone thinks it’s for real, some call it hype, some call it a technology for Cloud Providers, and some think that it was built by the academic community and that’s where it will stay for the long term, but you know what, people keep talking about it, and that’s a great thing…because you don’t want to be ignored ;).  There have been many blogs, tweets, and announcements in this space with the most recent coming from Nicira.

After reading Ivan Pepelnjak’s (ipspace) and Martin Casado’s (networkheresy) blogs recently, I noticed they were making general comparisons on network tunneling protocols.  These protocols are nothing new, for example using UDP, GRE, EoMPLS, VPLS, and a new one being mentioned over the past several months, VXLAN.  However, what caught my attention was CAPWAP was also a protocol each of them used to compare to GRE, UDP, and VXLAN.  As you’ll recall in my recent OpenFlow post, I spent quite a bit of time comparing OpenFlow to CAPWAP in the sense OpenFlow is being used to separate the control and data planes on switches and CAPWAP is being used to separate the control and data planes on Access Points.

I figured, why not, let’s google CAPWAP and OpenFlow together and see what comes up.  No surprise, you see the post from Matt Davy at IU who was drawing a similar comparison to OF/SDN to CAPWAP/WLAN, my recent blog, Ivan’s blog, Martin’s blog, and then finally the reason why I’m writing this – I saw a link to openvswitch.org that talked about building support for CAPWAP into the open vswitch.  Interesting, right?  Well, to me it is!  So after digging further, it looks like Jesse Gross (from Nicira, the company who does much of the development work on open vswitch) had some comments in the commit log for this feature.