vim-emu: A NFV multi-PoP emulation platform

This emulation platform was created to support network service developers to locally prototype and test their network services in realistic end-to-end multi-PoP scenarios. It allows the execution of real network functions, packaged as Docker containers, in emulated network topologies running locally on the developer's machine. The emulation platform also offers OpenStack-like APIs for each emulated PoP so that it can integrate with MANO solutions, like OSM. The core of the emulation platform is based on Containernet.

The emulation platform vim-emu is developed as part of OSM's DevOps MDG.

Acknowledgments

This software was originally developed by the SONATA project, funded by the European Commission under grant number 671517 through the Horizon 2020 and 5G-PPP programs.

Cite this work

If you use the emulation platform for your research and/or other publications, please cite the following paper to reference our work:

• M. Peuster, H. Karl, and S. v. Rossem: MeDICINE: Rapid Prototyping of Production-Ready Network Services in Multi-PoP Environments. IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN), Palo Alto, CA, USA, pp. 148-153. doi: 10.1109/NFV-SDN.2016.7919490. (2016)

Installation

There are three ways to install and use the emulation platform. The bare-metal installation requires a freshly installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and is done by an ansible playbook. The second option is to use a nested Docker environment to run the emulator inside a Docker container. The third option is to use Vagrant to create a VirtualBox-based VM on your machine that contains the pre-installed and configured emulator.

Option 1: Bare-metal installation

• Requires: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
• sudo apt-get install ansible git aptitude

1. Containernet

• cd
• git clone https://github.com/containernet/containernet.git
• cd ~/containernet/ansible
• sudo ansible-playbook -i "localhost," -c local install.yml

2. vim-emu

• cd
• git clone https://osm.etsi.org/gerrit/osm/vim-emu.git
• cd ~/vim-emu/ansible
• sudo ansible-playbook -i "localhost," -c local install.yml

Option 2: Nested Docker Deployment

This option requires a Docker installation on the host machine on which the emulator should be deployed.

• git clone https://osm.etsi.org/gerrit/osm/vim-emu.git
• cd ~/vim-emu
• Build the container: docker build -t vim-emu-img .
• Run the (interactive) container: docker run --name vim-emu -it --rm --privileged --pid='host' -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock vim-emu-img /bin/bash

Option 3: Vagrant Installation

• Request VirtualBox and Vagrant to be installed on the system.
• git clone https://osm.etsi.org/gerrit/osm/vim-emu.git
• cd ~/vim-emu
• vagrant up
• vagrant ssh to enter the new VM in which the emulator is installed.

Usage

Example

This simple example shows how to start the emulator with a simple topology (terminal 1) and how to start (terminal 2) some empty VNF containers in the emulated datacenters (PoPs) by using the vim-emu CLI.

• First terminal (start the emulation platform):
  • sudo python examples/default_single_dc_topology.py
• Second terminal (use docker exec vim-emu <command> for nested Docker deployment):
  • vim-emu compute start -d dc1 -n vnf1
  • vim-emu compute start -d dc1 -n vnf2
  • vim-emu compute list
• First terminal:
  • containernet> vnf1 ifconfig
  • containernet> vnf1 ping -c 2 vnf2

Further documentation and useful links

• Full CLI command documentation
• Requirements for Docker containers executed by the emulator
• REST API
• Mininet
• Containernet
• Maxinet

Development

How to contribute?

Please check this OSM wiki page to learn how to contribute to a OSM module.

Testing

To run the unit tests do:

• cd ~/vim-emu
• sudo py.test -v src/emuvim/test/unittests (To force Python2: python2 -m pytest -v src/emuvim/test/unittests)

Seed code contributors:

Lead:

• Manuel Peuster (https://github.com/mpeuster)
• Steven Van Rossem (https://github.com/stevenvanrossem)

Contributors

• Hadi Razzaghi Kouchaksaraei (https://github.com/hadik3r)
• Wouter Tavernier (https://github.com/wtaverni)
• Geoffroy Chollon (https://github.com/cgeoffroy)
• Eduard Maas (https://github.com/edmaas)
• Malte Splietker (https://github.com/splietker)
• Johannes Kampmeyer (https://github.com/xschlef)

License

The emulation platform is published under Apache 2.0 license. Please see the LICENSE file for more details.

Contact

Manuel Peuster (Paderborn University) manuel@peuster.de