Labbing up SDN?

Hi Everyone,
Forgive me if I am asking heresy. Is there a best practice way to lab SDN at home? What would the components of a home SDN lab be?

Thanks!

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networker050184

SDN is such a broad term. What exactly are you trying to lab up?

You could start looking around at open controllers working with ovs. There are quite a few tutorials out there if you google.

Node Man

Broad term is a part of my problem. Im looking at SDN from the perspective of a network engineer. In my mind I see SDN as an instance of pfSense running in a WMWare with other hosts directed to the pfSense. A virtual firewall for virtual machines.

I cant think of any way to build a lab where Layer2 & Layer 3 routing decisions are made by a remote centralized controller. I couldnt even think of models of equipment and software to Google.

Maybe GNS3 or Packet tracer will someday include SDN features.

UPDATE: I think i found a starting point:

http://openvswitch.org

networker050184

NFV isn't necessarily SDN, but its muddy waters. Really to get into 'SDN' you're going to want to play with some kind of openflow (or OVSDB) controller to orchestrate your ovs. Something like [URL="https://github.com/noxrepo/pox]POX[/url] is free and there are quite a few tutorials online.<br /><br />
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You could also look into [url="http://www.opencontrail.org/"]OpenContrail[/URL] which has some nice tutorials and documentation.

Lots of people in the enterprise these days are also looking at 'SD-WAN' implementations. Basically controllers to influence WAN traffic. This is probably the first place we'll see real adoption of SDN concepts in the wild so might be better to start there.

I'm certainly no expert in the field though and just starting to get my feet wet as well.