When using mininet and the VAN controller, always make sure that the mininet topology is not looped when the controller setting is hybrid.mode=true. This would occur even with the latest releases of VAN, but only in looped topologies (the 'tree' topology referenced above is not looped).
Detailed description follows ...
The hybrid.mode=true setting means that the VAN controller will delegate traditional forwarding decisions and topology calculations to the controlled switches, rather than doing specific path-paving itself. This is done to take advantage of the decades of forwarding logic built into switching ASICs. This means that VAN will rely upon spanning-tree or other data-plane protocols to resolve loops in the topology, so that VAN can focus on directing packets related to installed SDN applications (DNS, Lync, etc).
Since mininet does not resolve looped topologies on its own, this causes mininet to loop all packets when VAN is configured with hybrid.mode=true ... mininet assumes the controller will resolve the loop, and the VAN controller delegates that decision back to mininet.
Here's a technical paper which gives the conceptual motivations for hybrid.mode=true:
http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA5-6738ENW&cc=us&lc=en