installation of the opendaylight sdn controller

Installation of the OpenDaylight SDN controller

Peter van der Voort

Senior Solution Architect

[email protected]

January 2014


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Wanting to get acquainted with SDN, I decided to install the OpenDaylight1 SDN controller, just to see how it looks like and what the possibilities are. Visiting the OpenDaylight website, I’ve found a download section and thus assumed to be able to download a software package from there, somehow. However, the only message I got from there was “The first download from the project is expected in Q4 of 2013″. Ah, ok, that’s too bad (although we’re past Q4 of 2013 already).

2Being a bit disappointed, I clicked a bit back-and-forth on their website and ended up on the developers Wiki . Doing some 3more clicking around the page, I’ve found a link to actually download the software for the SDN controller.

Since the controller is Java based, it runs on both Windows and Linux. And although the subject of this article talks about “installation” of the controller, that is obviously not really true. The software will just run.

Ok, downloaded the software package and un-zipped it to a folder on the desktop. There are two options to run the software. There is “run.sh” which is used to start it on a Linux machine, and there is run.bat for windows.

The software needs to be started from the command line so there’s no point in double-clicking on the run.bat file. The SDN controller needs the Java Development Kit

(JDK) to be installed before it can run. This JDK can be downloaded from the Oracle4 website. I am running Windows 7 (64 bit) on my laptop so I’ve downloaded “jdk-7u45-windows-x64.exe”. Just download the software and click on it to have it installed, it should be pretty straightforward.


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When now executing run.bat, I got an error saying that the JAVA_HOME path was not found. To set this variable, go to “Start”, right-click on “Computer” and choose “properties”. On the left pane, click “Advanced system settings”. At the new window that appears, select the “Advanced” tab and click “Environment Variables” at the bottom.

Now you have the option to add either variables for your specific user or add system variables. Choose the latter and click on “New”. The variable name should be “JAVA_HOME” (without the quotes) and the variable name should probably be “C:\Progra~1\Java\jre7”. This is when you’re on a 64-bit machine and Java is installed in “C:\Program Files\Java\jre7”. And since there’s the space between “Program” and “Files”, you need to put the path in the notation like “Progra~1”. Close all open windows by clicking “OK” as needed and reboot your computer to make the changes active. Then, open a DOS box and go to the directory where you’ve unzipped you’re files. Now execute run.bat. The first few seconds, nothing seem to happen but then you’ll see lots of text scrolling over the window. After about 30 seconds, it should end with “Meter Config Provider started”. Now hit enter and you get a prompt like in below figure.


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When typing “exit” in the DOS box at the “osgi” prompt, the SDN controller software will be terminated. Open a browser and enter “localhost:8080” in the address bar. It should take you to the login-page of the SDN controller.

Login using “admin” as username and password and you’re there! So far, I have just installed the software, that’s it. I don’t know how well this version of the software really works. But at least I have a bit more of a feel of the OpenDaylight controller. The next step would be to have the SDN controller interoperate with Mininet5, a virtual switching environment.


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References

1 www.opennetworking.org

2 https://wiki.opendaylight.org/view/Main_Page

3 https://jenkins.opendaylight.org/controller/job/controller-

merge/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/opendaylight/distribution/opendaylight/target/distribution.opendaylight-osgipackage.zip

4 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk7-downloads-1880260.html

5 http://mininet.org/

All opinions expressed in this paper are my own and do not reflect those of the company I work for

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© 2014 – Peter van der Voort – [email protected]

This article was originally written as a blog on http://yenniq.nl/installation-of-the-opendaylight-sdn-controller/

installation of the opendaylight sdn controller

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