VirtualBox is an open-source virtual machine manager and hypervisor that may also be used as a network emulator. In addition to creating and managing individual virtual machines, VirtualBox can connect virtual machines together to emulate a network of computers and network appliances such as routers or servers. VirtualBox works on the major computing platforms: Windows, […]
This post lists the commands required on each node to build a network of three Ubuntu Linux routers. Each router is connected to the other two routers and is running quagga. Each router is also connected to a PC running Ubuntu Linux. I use this network configuration to evaluate network emulators and open-source networking software
dCore Linux is a minimal Linux system based on the Tiny Core Linux system. Like Tiny Core Linux, dCore loads its file system entirely into RAM, which should provide good performance in large network emulation scenarios running on a single host computer. dCore Linux allows users to install additional software from the Debian or Ubuntu
Mininet-WiFi is a fork of the Mininet SDN network emulator. The Mininet-WiFi developers extended the functionality of Mininet by adding virtualized WiFi stations and access points based on the standard Linux wireless drivers and the 80211_hwsim wireless simulation driver. They also added classes to support the addition of these wireless devices in a Mininet network
To learn more about OpenStack cloud management software, a student or researcher may install OpenStack on a single machine, such as a laptop computer or a virtual machine, and emulate a small datacenter using virtual machines or containers. Researchers and students may choose from multiple projects that will set up OpenStack on a single machine.
OpenDaylight (ODL) is a popular open-source SDN controller framework. To learn more about OpenDaylight, it is helpful to use it to manage an emulated network of virtual switches and virtual hosts. Most people use the Mininet network emulator to create a virtual SDN network for OpenDaylight to control. In this post, I will show how
The Cloonix network simulator has been updated to version 29, which adds the ability to save network simulation topologies and node configurations to a directory. Users may save a network topology and all node configurations to a directory of their choice. They may also load saved topologies into Cloonix so they can restore a network
I recently purchased a used Lenovo Thinkpad T420 laptop to replace the Lenovo Thinkpad T400 I was previously using as my main platform for researching open-source network simulators and emulators. The T420 is a five-year old product but it offers all the ports and performance I need. Because it is well past its depreciation curve,
When writing a blog post about a technical topic, I often capture a lot of screen shots that I need to edit before adding them to my blog article. Usually I want to add a border around each image and I sometimes want to reduce the size of images that are too large. I want
The Cloonix development team recently released a major update to the Cloonix network simulator. Cloonix version 28 makes major changes to the infrastructure of Cloonix. It changes the installation procedure, the location of Cloonix files on your computer, and the names of the commands used to start and administer Cloonix. Cloonix version 28 also makes
I need to determine the maximum number of KVM virtual machines that can run on an average laptop computer. Unfortunately, I cannot find authoritative information about the maximum number of KVM virtual machines that can run on a host computer. Most information I could find about KVM limits does not publish absolute limits but, instead,
In this post, I will show how to set up data capture in the GNS3 network simulator when using network devices that are emulated by VirtualBox or QEMU virtual machines. The GNS3 network simulator makes it easy for users to capture and view data passing across the interfaces of devices running in a GNS3 network