While NSX and ACI is garnering much of the headlines for SDN, the market is much bigger than these two products. The foundation of most other solutions is based on a combination of Open vSwitch, some virtual router and maturing protocols such as Open Flow and VXLAN. A valid question may be how do you start to learn these technologies in your home lab.
Fortunately, you can build an extremely flexible SDN lab with some of the same tools and equipment you’ve used to learn virtualization technologies. I wrote a post over on SearchSDN on getting started with the most basic component of SDN, the Open vSwitch.
In the world of OpenStack, Open vSwitch is the fundamental building block of virtual networks. It is extremely beneficial to understand Open vSwitch and how to leverage it to interact with Cloud management platforms such as OpenStack.
Virtualized Geek 