README

VLANd - complex networks on demand

What is VLANd?
==============

VLANd is a simple (hah!) python program intended to make it easy to
manage port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a
network. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable
driver API to allow for a wide range of different switches to be
controlled together.

Various of the switch vendors have management applications available
which should be able to do a similar job, but they're typically not
scriptable, or locked to only control their own vendor's
equipment. VLANd is designed (and hoped!) to be better. We've found
that other network management programs also exist, but either they
don't manage VLANs in the way we want or they depend on large
frameworks like Openstack.

For *now*, VLANd includes two drivers for different families of Cisco
switches. That's not great as a cross-platform selling point, but
they're all we have available at the moment. Initial work is underway
to support some TP-Link switches too, using the same driver API, and
it is expected that more drivers will be included in future
releases. Please feel free to propose more target devices, or (better)
send patches!

Why VLANd?
==========

VLANd has been written to accompany Linaro's LAVA platform.

LAVA is the Linaro Automated Validation Architecture - see
https://validation.linaro.org/ for more information.

LAVA started off as a framework to help perform validation and testing
on simple single devices such as Android development boards. Since
then, the range of tests and devices has grown hugely. Some users have
added multi-node tests, i.e. tests that start up multiple devices that
run tests against each other (e.g. client-server testing). The next
step on from that is to test devices with multiple network interfaces,
where on top of the client-serer testing it is required that their
connectivity can be controlled and isolated (e.g. for network
performance testing).

This can be done by simply changing physical network connections, of
course, but that doesn't scale for sequences of tests and it makes a
lie of the "Automated" bit in the LAVA definition.

VLANd is the solution that we have implemented for this problem. It
provides a simple VLAN management abstraction for users. LAVA can use
VLANd to set up complex networks on demand as tests are initiated, and
can then tear them down again when tests are complete.

Dependencies
============

postgres server and psycopg2, for the back-end database. See
db/setup_db.py for help in setting up the database for access.

How to use
==========

For now, things are easiest run as "vland" with appropriate
permissions in the database for that user.

The core VLANd code is simple to configure - see vland.cfg for an
example config file. Once your copy of VLANd is running, use the
administration utility admin.py to control what it does. For now, this
is single-threaded and has *no* security. This *will* change in the
future, but for very early development has not been a priority.

Future plans
============

As a start...

 * More documentation
 * More drivers to control more devices, both real and virtual
 * Visualisation options
 * Better (some!) security
 * Background sanity checking
 * Other filtering options - MAC-based rather than just port-based
   (needed to support virtual machines, etc.)

If you have other ideas, please talk to us!

Contact
=======

VLANd mailing list: vland-devel@linaro.org

Code
====

https://git.linaro.org/lava/vland.git

License
=======

VLANd is Copyright 2014-2015 Linaro Limited, and is distributed under
the GNU General Public License, version 2 (or any later version). See
the accompanying COPYING file for more details.

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README for VLANd 0.2, 13th February 2015
Steve McIntyre <steve.mcintyre@linaro.org>