Recently, as I was talking to a friend about OpenStack, oVirt, and other Open Source Cloud and Virtualization technologies, he stopped me and had me back up. This friend has a strong background in VMware technologies, but not so much with their Open Source counterparts. It occurred to me there are others who may be coming from the same VMware background, thus I decided to create a handy cheat sheet for folks new to Open Source Cloud and Virtualization technologies who have a VMware background.

With all the hoopla surrounding SDN, in all of it’s forms, I thought it would be interesting to look at a possible predecesor to OpenFlow, at least in spirit: The ForCES protocol. From RFC 5810, we have the following description of ForCES: Forwarding and Control Element Separation (ForCES) defines an architectural framework and associated protocols to standardize information exchange between the control plane and the forwarding plane in a ForCES Network Element (ForCES NE).

With all of the talk regarding Software Defined Networks (SDN), it’s easy to get lost trying to understand where the value will be. The general consensus here is that value will be built on top of SDN. SDN is, in essence, a building block. One interesting project providing value by using SDN as a building block is the RouteFlow project. The goal of the project, taken straight form the front page, is: