HPE Aruba Networking Fabric Composer vs ONOS

HPE Aruba Networking Fabric Composer is a paid, API-based orchestration solution for day-to-day operations across rack-scale compute and storage infrastructure. It provides unified network and security management for HPE Aruba Networking CX platforms, including switch configurations and firewall policies. Guided workflows automate discovery, leaf-spine deployment, VSX, BGP or OSPF underlay, BGP EVPN overlay, VLAN groups, VRF, EVPN, firmware services, and micro-segmentation. Version 7.4.0 supports up to 500 switches. Integration packs include NetEdit, HPE iLO Amplifier, ODIM, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Prism, Pensando PSM, and VMware environments. Fabric Composer centrally orchestrates segmentation, stateless ACLs, and stateful distributed-firewall policies, with separate NetOps and SecOps roles for Aruba CX 10K switches. It is delivered as an ISO or virtual-machine OVA for virtual or physical hosts, running as one instance or a highly available three-node cluster. Audit logs record actions, users, roles, endpoints, and session details.

ONOS is an open-source software-defined networking platform that provides a control plane for managing network components and running communication-service modules. Its µONOS architecture supports device configuration, monitoring and maintenance, forwarding-plane programming, topology validation, and fine-grained performance metrics. A symmetric cluster of identical instances distributes work across servers and is designed to handle instance failures; the architecture is described as highly available and dynamically scalable. Control and configuration interfaces include P4/P4Runtime, gNMI/OpenConfig, and gNOI, with gRPC connecting modular microservices. OpenFlow is the primary southbound protocol, and OVSDB, NETCONF, and SNMP are also named for device configuration. The microservices are designed for cloud and data center infrastructure using Kubernetes, with Docker images and Helm charts listed as deployment tools. A cloud-native web GUI uses Angular and gRPC Web to access backend modules. ONOS is free and published under the Apache License 2.0. It is aimed mainly at service-provider networks, with data-center and campus networks also identified as possible uses. Production downloads are recommended as a release tar.gz package or Docker image; the listed LTS release is X-Wing 2.7.0, dated July 16, 2021.