Could SDN (flows) be used for network segmentation.

Hi

I am hoping someone can help me out with something I am trying to work on.

I have been put in charge of reforming a bunch of lab environments that pretty much all do the same thing but with different nuances. The idea would be to move everything into 1 lab and use VLAN's to separate the endpoints that the labs connect to.

So we would have different clients and servers that would need to connect to different endpoints. The client/server setups would need to be able to be adhoc changed to use the different endpoints for testing.

Also as I have a limited set of clients and servers, I would like to be able to chop and change them, i.e. take a client from 1 lab and quickly have it in another one, also maybe move a server to a different lab.

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We are planning on using VLAN's to separate out the functions, i.e. labs and endpoints. Possibly even multiple VLAN's for clients, servers and endpoints to allow a chop and change setup as needed.

We will need to setup a script or multiple scripts to make the changes easy for the DEVs. Possibly run through some type of orchestration.

We have numerous different types of switch; cisco, arista, exablaze, etc.

My query is this:

Would it be possible to use an SDN controller to control the switches and have it make flows for different lab segmentation, either instead of VLAN's or as a way of changing the switchport VLAN's easily.

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In future I would also like to add tap aggregation and hopefully mux/demux abilities.

Any advice would be appreciated. If there is somewhere else I should post this, please let me know.