Network slices are an abstraction for isolating SDN networks deployed to a common physical infrastructure.  Slices not only enable safe federated network control, they also provide a means of modularly structuring SDN controller programs, greatly reducing their complexity.

The slice abstraction comes with a semantic definition of isolation independent of the particular mechanism(s) used to achieve it.  Of course, our implementation (part of the Frenetic project) also includes one such mechanism.

Modern data centers are more than just switches; data center engineers are tasked with orchestrating collections of virtual machines (VMs) while maintaining connectivity, at the very least, and perhaps load balancing, monitoring, and other complex networking tasks as well.

Generalizing past work on Frenetic, we present an ambitious new vision of declarative data center programming, starting with the live migration of ensembles of VMs and SDN switches.  The data center engineers simply specifies new locations for switches and VMs, and the LIME platform enacts the migration.  Critically, we have proved that neither the VMs nor the SDN controller can distinguish between a network undergoing migration and a migration-free network.