SDN Operation and integration

On this page, you can find useful codes and procedures created by AmLight engineers aiming to help the SDN operation and integration.

OESS backend for OpenNSA

UNDER CONSTRUCTION: Open NSA + OESS Integration

AmLight links are used to interconnect AMPATH and SouthernLight Academic Exchange Points/GLIF GOLES. Both AMPATH and SouthernLight support NSI. Nonetheless, with the SDN deployment at AmLight in 2014 the NSI Agent installed on both sites – OpenNSA – had its backend replaced. As there was no solution for NSI+OESS at that time, an OESS backend have been developed to work with OpenNSA.This documentation assumes that you already have OpenNSA installed in your environment, with all topologies and CA certificates in place. If you don’t, please click here.To integrate your OESS installation with your OpenNSA installation follow the steps below:

UNDER CONSTRUCTION:

  1. Download the oess.py backend and place it on OPENNSA_FOLDER/opennsa/backends/
  2. Apply the patch opennsa_oess_patch.patch to create the backend on OpenNSA structure
  3. Follow the OESS configuration guide and follow all the steps to create the configuration

Useful links:

 

OESS and Zabbix Integration

OESS and Zabbix Integration

OESS is an excellent tool to provision and manage Layer 2 circuits in an OpenFlow 1.0 environment. Using its User Interface (UI), it’s possible to create OpenFlow circuits, see their utilization per link, reprovision, etc. Sometimes, however, Network Operations teams want to have all information centralized in a single Network Management System (NMS), which would make it easier to manage permissions, integrate with SMS, Jabber or e-mail systems. Zabbix was the NMS chosen by AmLight a few years ago, and it manages all IT components involved in the daily operations. Even OESS being capable to provide info through a nice and clean UI, AmLight Network Engineering team decided to keep using Zabbix as the central platform for all notifications and event visualization. A tool was created to gather info from OESS and import into the Zabbix database, and this How-To will explain how this integration works. This How-To assumes Zabbix is up and running, with version 2.2.9+ on a CentOS 6.6 64 bits.

Features provided by this integration:

  • Each node or link will have historical data of when it was up or down;
  • Each circuit will have historical data of when was it using the primary or the backup path and when it was down;
  • The number of circuits along per time frame will be provided as a graph;
  • Triggers will alert admins of circuits in the backup or down state

1 – Download the oess_cli.py script to your Zabbix’s “externalscripts” folder:

cd /usr/share/zabbix/externalscripts/

git clone https://github.com/jab1982/oess-cli

cp oess-cli/oess-cli.py .

2 – Configure all local variables accordingly to your topology:

url, user, password and group associated with the user in the OESS

This user should be read-only.

3 – Import the Zabbix OESS Template:

Download it from [2]

Log as admin on Zabbix

Click Configuration -> Templates -> Import -> Chosen File.

Select the downloaded Zabbix template file and click on Import

4 – Add the OESS Template to the node where OESS is installed

Still on Zabbix, click on Configuration -> Hosts

Select the node where OESS is installed

Click on the Template tab

In the text box write: Template OESS

Click on Add then Save.

5 – Wait a few minutes until Zabbix collect enough information and it’s done.

 

 

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