Overview
+ +Containernet is a fork of the famous Mininet network emulator and allows to use Docker containers as hosts in the emulated network topologies. This enables interesting functionalities to build networking/cloud emulators and testbeds. One example for this is the NFV multi-PoP infrastructure emulator created by the SONATA project.
+ +Containernet in action
+ + + +Cite this work
+ +If you use Containernet for your work, please cite the following publication:
+ +-
+
- 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) +
Get started
+ +Using Containernet is very similar to using Mininet with custom topologies.
+ +Create a custom topology
+ +First, a Python-based topology has to be created as shown in the following example.
+ +"""
+Example topology with two containers (d1, d2),
+two switches, and one controller:
+
+ - (c)-
+ | |
+(d1) - (s1) - (s2) - (d2)
+"""
+from mininet.net import Containernet
+from mininet.node import Controller
+from mininet.cli import CLI
+from mininet.link import TCLink
+from mininet.log import info, setLogLevel
+setLogLevel('info')
+
+net = Containernet(controller=Controller)
+info('*** Adding controller\n')
+net.addController('c0')
+info('*** Adding docker containers using ubuntu:trusty images\n')
+d1 = net.addDocker('d1', ip='10.0.0.251', dimage="ubuntu:trusty")
+d2 = net.addDocker('d2', ip='10.0.0.252', dimage="ubuntu:trusty")
+info('*** Adding switches\n')
+s1 = net.addSwitch('s1')
+s2 = net.addSwitch('s2')
+info('*** Creating links\n')
+net.addLink(d1, s1)
+net.addLink(s1, s2, cls=TCLink, delay='100ms', bw=1)
+net.addLink(s2, d2)
+info('*** Starting network\n')
+net.start()
+info('*** Testing connectivity\n')
+net.ping([d1, d2])
+info('*** Running CLI\n')
+CLI(net)
+info('*** Stopping network')
+net.stop()
+You can find this topology in containernet/examples/containernet_example.py.
Run emulation and interact with containers
+ +Containernet requires root access to configure the emulated network described by the topology script:
+ +sudo python containernet_example.py
+After launching the emulated network, you can interact with the involved containers through Mininetâs interactive CLI as shown with the ping command in the following example:
containernet> d1 ping -c3 d2
+PING 10.0.0.252 (10.0.0.252) 56(84) bytes of data.
+64 bytes from 10.0.0.252: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=200 ms
+64 bytes from 10.0.0.252: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=200 ms
+64 bytes from 10.0.0.252: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=200 ms
+
+--- 10.0.0.252 ping statistics ---
+3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms
+rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 200.162/200.316/200.621/0.424 ms
+containernet>
+To stop the emulation, do:
+ +containernet> exit
+Installation
+ +Automatic installation is provided using an Ansible playbook. Requires a bare-metal machine or VM with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
+ +sudo apt-get install ansible git aptitude
+git clone https://github.com/containernet/containernet.git
+cd containernet/ansible
+sudo ansible-playbook -i "localhost," -c local install.yml
+References
+ +Containernet has been used for a variety of research tasks and networking projects. If you use Containernet, let us know.
+ +Publications
+ +-
+
-
+
S. v. Rossem, W. Tavernier, M. Peuster, D. Colle, M. Pickavet and P. Demeester: Monitoring and debugging using an SDK for NFV-powered telecom applications. IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN), Palo Alto, CA, USA, Demo Session. (2016)
+
+ -
+
M. Peuster, H. Karl: Understand Your Chains: Towards Performance Profile-based Network Service Management. Accepted in Fifth European Workshop on Software Defined Networks (EWSDN). IEEE. (2016)
+
+ -
+
Qiao, Yuansong, et al. Doopnet: An emulator for network performance analysis of Hadoop clusters using Docker and Mininet. Computers and Communication (ISCC), 2016 IEEE Symposium on. IEEE, 2016.
+
+ -
+
M. Peuster, S. Dräxler, H. Razzaghi, S. v. Rossem, W. Tavernier and H. Karl: A Flexible Multi-PoP Infrastructure Emulator for Carrier-grade MANO Systems. In IEEE 3rd Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft) Demo Track . (2017) Best demo award!
+
+ -
+
M. Peuster and H. Karl: Profile Your Chains, Not Functions: Automated Network Service Profiling in DevOps Environments. IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN), Berlin, Germany. (2017) (accepted)
+
+
Links
+ +-
+
- Mininet website +
- Maxinet website +
- Docker +
Contact
+ +Support
+If you have any questions, please use GitHubâs issue system or Containernetâs Gitter channel to get in touch.
+ +Contribute
+Your contributions are very welcome! Please fork the GitHub repository and create a pull request. We use Travis-CI to automatically test new commits.
+ +Lead developer
+ +Manuel Peuster
+-
+
- Mail: <manuel (dot) peuster (at) upb (dot) de> +
- GitHub: @mpeuster +
- Website: Paderborn University +