FlowScale is a project to divide and distribute traffic over multiple physical switch ports. FlowScale replicates the functionality in load balancing appliances but using a Top of Rack (ToR) switch to distribute traffic. Using software to handle the control plane specification but switch hardware to do the forwarding gives both great flexibility and allows for low cost, high throughput deployments.
Key Features
- Web User Interface: A webUI is used to manage the TOR switches connected to FlowScale and to administer how traffic is divided and providing a view of statistics and status
- Policy Configuration: OpenFlow controller sending rules based on policy configuration based on an IP address, Ethernet Type, or TCP/UDP port
- OpenFlow capable ToR switch : The capability of replacing expensive equipment with a ToR switch
- Multi-Platform: FlowScale is built on Java and may run on multiple platforms. It has been tested on different distributions of Linux as well as Mac OS X.
- HotSwapping: The ability of FlowScale to dynamically offload heavy traffic from high-loaded output ports to ones with a lower load. More Details
- Failover: Outgoing traffic from a switch will be distributed among other ports on the switch should that particular port go offline.
- Traffic Mirroring: FlowScale allows a ToR to mirror duplicate traffic directed to output ports.
- REST API A REST API interface is available to allow users to directly manage FlowScale
Software
Software may be available as a binary for Linux environments or as a source tarball.
Source software is available at GitHub
Quick Start Guide gives instructions on how to get started either by downloading the source code or the binary files.
Design documents
- Initial Design Document
- Screenshots - Front Page - Admin
Deployments
FlowScale is currently being deployed as part of the Intrusion Detection Systems operated by the Indiana University Information Security Office
News
Slides from the Educause SPC presentation in May 2012
FlowScale demo at SC11
Slides and Poster from the FlowScale presentation at the GENI Engineering Conference 12 in Kansas City
Community
Mailing lists
FlowScale Developers mailing list: flowscale-dev@googlegroups.com [Archives]
FlowScale Announcements mailing list: flowscale-announce@googlegroups.com [Archives]
Bug Tracking and Feature Requests
Issues are being tracked in Github issue tracking