HPE Aruba Networking Fabric Composer vs OpenDaylight

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.

OpenDaylight is a free, open-source SDN controller for centralized, programmable network control and monitoring. Its modular design uses YANG models and MD-SAL to connect applications with network hardware through northbound REST APIs and southbound plugins. Listed protocol support includes OpenFlow, NETCONF, BGP-LS, PCEP, OVSDB, LISP, and SNMP, among others. Clustering, sharded data stores, and leader-based consensus support scaling across nodes. The project describes uses in optical transport, service-provider WAN automation, data center SDN, network telemetry, enterprise network control, and ONAP. Its AAA project provides authentication, authorization, accounting, and role-based access control for northbound interfaces. OpenDaylight is self-hosted and runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows; setup requires Java 21 or later. The downloads page identifies Chromium-SR0 as the current release and lists Vanadium-SR1 and Titanium-SR3 under supported releases. Documentation, Zulip chat, mailing lists, a wiki, and weekly Technical Steering Committee meetings are listed as community resources.