SOFTWARE DEFINED NETWORKING: VIRTUAL ROUTER PERFORMANCE Bachelor Degree Project in Network and System Administration Level ECTS Spring term 2016 Björn Svantesson Supervisor: Jianguo Ding Examiner: Manfred Jeusfeld Table of Contents 1Introduction..........................................................................................................................................1 2Background...........................................................................................................................................2 2.1Virtualization................................................................................................................................2 2.2Hypervisors...................................................................................................................................2 2.3VMware ESXi................................................................................................................................2 2.4Software defined networking.......................................................................................................3 2.5The split of the data and control plane........................................................................................3 2.6Centralization of network control................................................................................................4 2.7Network virtualization..................................................................................................................4 2.8Software routers..........................................................................................................................6 3Problem Description.............................................................................................................................7 3.1Research question........................................................................................................................7 3.2Motivation for the study..............................................................................................................8 3.3Critical validity threats(more specific)..........................................................................................9 4Related Work......................................................................................................................................10 5Milestones..........................................................................................................................................12 5.1Delimitations..............................................................................................................................12 5.2Hypothesis..................................................................................................................................12 6Methodology......................................................................................................................................13 7Implementation..................................................................................................................................17 8Results from initial testing..................................................................................................................20 8.1VyOS results...............................................................................................................................20 8.2Pfsense results............................................................................................................................24 8.3OpenWRT results........................................................................................................................27 8.4Comparison................................................................................................................................30 9Final results........................................................................................................................................31 9.1VyOS Final results.......................................................................................................................31 9.2OpenWRT final results................................................................................................................34 9.3Hardware router results.............................................................................................................37 9.4Final comparison........................................................................................................................40 10 Discussion........................................................................................................................................41 10.1Related work............................................................................................................................41 10.2Methodology............................................................................................................................41 10.3Implementation........................................................................................................................41 10.4Results......................................................................................................................................42 10.5What went wrong?...................................................................................................................44 11 Future work.....................................................................................................................................45 12 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................45 13 Validity Threats................................................................................................................................46 14 References.......................................................................................................................................48 15 Appendix A: Logical topology, physical and logical network............................................................50 16 Appendix B logical topology during implementations.....................................................................52 17 Appendix C PerformanceTest images and explanation....................................................................53 18 Appendix D Netstress explanation and images................................................................................54 19 Appendix E Vmware performance graphs.......................................................................................55 1 Introduction Virtualization is becoming more and more popular since the hardware that is available today often has the ability to run more than just a single machine. The hardware is too powerful in relation to the requirements of the software that is supposed to run on the hardware, making it inefficient to run too little software on too powerful of machines. With virtualization, the ability exists to run a lot of different software on the same hardware, thereby increasing the efficiency of hardware usage. Virtualization doesn't stop at just virtualizing operating systems or commodity software, but can also be used to virtualize networking components. These networking components include everything from routers to switches and are possible to set up on any kind of virtulized system. When discussing virtualization of networking components, the experssion “Software Defined Networking” is hard to miss. Software Defined Networking is a definition that contains all of these virtualized networking components and is the expression that should be used when researching further into this subject. There's an increasing interest in these virtualized networking components now in relation to just a few years ago. This is due to company networking becoming much more complex now in relation to the complexity that could be found in a network a few years back. More services need to be up inside of the network and a lot of people believe that Software Defined Networking can help in this regard. This thesis aim is to try to find out what kind of differences there are between multiple different software routers. Finding out things like, which one of the routers that offer the highest network speed for the least amount of hardware cost, are the kind of things that this thesis will be focused on. It will also look at some different aspects of performance that the routers offer in relation to one another in order to try to establish if there exists any kind of “best” router in multiple different areas. The idea is to build up a virtualized network that somewhat relates to how a normal network looks in smaller companies today. This network will then be used for different types of testing while having the software based router placed in the middle and having it take care of routing between different local virtual networks. All of the routers will be placed on the same server and their configuration will be very basic while also making sure that each of the routers get access to the same amount of hardware. After initial testing, all routers that perform bad will be opted out for additional testing. This is done to make sure that there's no unnecessary testing done on routers that seem to not be able to keep up with the other ones. The results from these tests will be compared to the results of a hardware router with the same kind of tests used with it in the middle in relation to the tests the software routers had to go through.