Mininet is a tool that can emulate a realistic network on a single machine or VM with CLI support to interact with and API to customize, extend it. Mininet supports creating virtual hosts linking them to switch and hooking it up with a controller. It does all of this leveraging the same underlying components and techniques we used to in the previous example for network namespace-based virtual network. Refer to http://mininet.org/overview/.
You have two options to install the mininet tool:
- Using the Ubuntu
apt-getcommand:$ sudo apt-get install mininet - Install from the source code
$ git clone git://github.com/mininet/mininet.git $ util/install.sh -fnv
We recommend using the first option.
In this example, we will create a Mininet setup and check the actions it performs to the Open vSwitch to emulate network.
Let us create a Mininet network with a switch and a couple of hosts, connect it to controller, and check out the underlying actions it does to accomplish the virtual network emulation.
- The first step is to create a Mininet with a switch with three hosts, with Open vSwitch as the switch connected to external controller.
- Let us check the configuration that Mininet creates using the OVS commands.
- Next, let us check the interfaces created by Mininet in the host OS.
We can see from the output of OVS that Mininet configures OVS switch connects to the external controller and creates interfaces based on easy-to-use Mininet commands.
Mininet supports a rich set of commands to emulate real network conditions, such as setting up link bandwidth, link delay, and loss characteristics.
Mininet provides APIs to specify nodes and link parameters, and define network objects and topology templates.