Applications of the Cisco APIC-EM software-defined networking controller for a virtualized testbed

Cisco DevNet Always-On APIC-EM Sandbox is useful in the phase of learning about software-defined networking, allowing to perform experiments, but without the possibility to change the topology the extent of development is limited. In this paper a Cisco APIC-EM SDN Controller was installed in a private cloud orchestrated by OpenStack. The major objective was to create a virtualized testbed, consisting on four virtual Cisco CSR1000v routers, and two Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual machines, acting as Source and respectively Destination node. To ensure the automatic discovery of hosts, a physical Cisco C2960-CX switch has been included, enabling IP Device Tracking protocol. Relying initially on the Python scripts provided by DevNet, we modified them accordingly and even we created new ones for our own purposes. Four major applications provided by APIC-EM (i.e. Discovery, Topology, Path Trace and EasyQoS) were tested with success.