Configuration and Management working group (CMWG) of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) prepared OpenFlow Management and Configuration Protocol (OF-CONFIG) for switch management in an OpenFlow environment. Unfortunately, Open vSwitch (OVS), the leading open-source implementation of an OpenFlow switch, uses its own Open vSwitch Data Base management (OVSDB) protocol. This holds back a wider acceptance of the OF-CONFIG protocol.

To overcome this state, it is necessary to implement support of the OF-CONFIG protocol into OVS. This implementation should be easily available for the OVS users to allow them utilization of the OF-CONFIG protocol.

We are going to implement an application extending the OVS’s OVSDB server with an external application implementing the OF-CONFIG protocol. We utilize OVSDB server since it is highly integrated in the OVS architecture and bypassing the entire OVSDB would be counterproductive.

OF-CONFIG uses NETCONF as the asociated protocol. So, the OF-CONFIG protocol and the NETCONF protocol are interchangeable terms in this context.

The following diagram shows how the OF-CONFIG server is intergated into the Open vSwitch architecture. While the OF-CONFIG server is running as a system daemon (service), the NETCONF agents are invoked as an SSH Subsystem separately for each connected OF-CONFIG client.

    +---------+  +-----------+     +-----------+
    |  OVSDB  |  | OF-CONFIG |     | OF-CONFIG |
    |  client |  |  client   | ... |  client   |
    +---------+  +-----------+     +-----------+
         ^                ^           ^
         |                |           |
         |               NETCONF protocol
         |                |           |
         |                v           v
         |              +---------------+
         |              |  SSH Server   |
         |       +------+----+-----+----+------+
         |       |  NETCONF  |     |  NETCONF  |
         |       |   agent   | ... |   agent   |
         |       +-----------+     +-----------+
         |                 ^         ^
         |                 |         |
         |                 v         v
         |                +-----------+
         |                | OF-CONFIG |
         |                |  server   |
         v                +-----------+
    +---------+                 |
    |  OVSDB  |                 |
    |  server |<----------------+
    +---------+