OpenDaylight Summit 2016

In order to enable pooling of multiple ODL controllers for the purpose of high availability and scalability we present a generic mechanism for distributed management of functional roles.

Example roles are the responsibility for certain resources such as OpenFlow switches, the responsibility for handling events related to IDs in various ID spaces, such as MAC or IP addresses, or the responsibility for health monitoring of system components such as switches or VNF's.

Roles may be distributed among ODL controllers belonging to the same cluster as well as ODL controllers in different clusters.

The definition of the roles allows for controller load sharing and high availability is achieved by defining backup controller instances per role shard.

Tables stored in a data store of choice define the roles and shards and are managed by an elected leader per role (coordinators).