The objective of this work is to reduce drag on a bluff body within a viscous flow by applying suction or injection of fluid along the surface of the body. In addition to minimizing drag, the optimal solution tends to reduce boundary layer separation and flow recirculation. When discretized by finite elements, the optimal control problem can be posed as a large-scale nonlinearly-constrained optimization problem. The constraints correspond to the discretized form of the Navier-Stokes equations. Unfortunately, solving such large-scale problems directly is essentially intractable. We developed several Sequential Quadratic Programming methods that are tailored to the structure of the control problem. Example problems of laminar flow around an infinite cylinder in two dimensions are solved to demonstrate the methodology. We use these optimal control techniques to study the influence of number of suction/injection holes and location of holes on the resulting optimized flow. We compare the proposed SQP methods against one another, as well as against available methods from the literature, from the point of view of efficiency and robustness. The most efficient of the proposed methods is two orders of magnitude faster than existing methods.