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Mininet, with Bob Lantz and Brian O'Connor from ON.LAB
Interview with Bob Lantz and Brian O'Connor of ON.LAB, about Mininet software for simulating networks.
Bob previously gave a talk about Mininet (slides,
video) at the
Open vSwitch 2015
Fall Conference.
Bob describes the mission of ON.LAB and how he ended up there. He talks
about introducing the idea of a network operating system to ON.LAB. He
mentioned that his interest in networks arose from a lecture by Nick
McKeown in the EE380 lecture series at Stanford, in which Nick stated:
“Networks are like hardware without an operating system,” which piqued
Bob's interest.
Brian relates his own experience getting involved with SDN, Mininet, and
ON.LAB.
Bob describes the genesis of Mininet by analogy to mobile device
development. Mobile device development is a pain because no one wants to
spend all their time with these tiny devices, so you use a simulator.
For network development, you need a simulator too because otherwise you
need a huge stack of expensive hardware. Mininet was directly inspired
by a network namespaces-based simulator developed in-house at Arista for
testing EOS.
Bob compares Mininet to Docker and other container systems. All of these
are container orchestration systems that make use of the “namespace”
and control group (cgroup) features of the Linux kernel. Mininet gives
more control over the network topology than the others.
Bob talks about limitations in OpenStack networking and what he'd like to
see OpenStack support in networking.
Brian describes a trend in NFV toward minimization, that is, reducing the
amount of overhead due to VMs, often by running in containers instead.
He speculates that containers might later be considered too heavyweight.
In Mininet, isolation is à la carte: the aspects of network isolation,
process isolation, and so on can all be configured independently, so that
users do not experience overhead that is not needed for a particular
application.
Bob talks about the scale that Mininet can achieve and that users
actually want to simulate in practice and contrasts it against the scale
(and particular diameter) of real networks. Versus putting each switch
in a VM, Bob says that Mininet allows for up to two orders of magnitude
scale improvement. His original vision was to simulate the entire
Stanford network of 25,000 nodes on a rack of machines. Bob talks about
distributed systems built on Mininet, which are not officially integrated
into Mininet. Distributed Mininet clusters are a work in progress. In
general, Mininet scales better than most controllers.
Bob compares Mininet to ns3. ns3
was originally a cycle-accurate simulator, but this made it hard to
connect to real hardware and run in real time, so it has moved in a
direction where it works in a mode similar to Mininet.
Bob describes the Mininet development community, based on github pull
requests. Bob describes a paradox in which they'd like to accept
contributions but most of the patches that they receive are not of
adequate quality.
Bob talks about performance in OVS related to Mininet, as a review of his
previous talk, and especially related to how Mininet speaks to OVSDB.
The scale of Mininet doesn't interact well with the design of the OVS
command-line tool for configuring OVS, which doesn't expect thousands of
ports or perform well when they are present. Bob reports that creating
Linux veth devices is also
slow.
Bob describes how to generate traffic with Mininet: however you like!
Since you can run any application with Mininet, you can generate traffic
with any convenient software.
Brian's wish list: improving the support for clustering Mininet and the
ability to “dilate time” to make Mininet simulation more accurate to
specific hardware, and the ability to model the control network.
You can contact Brian via email. Bob
recommends emailing the Mininet mailing list to get in contact with him.
OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode is Drive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013 by Alex. The bumper music is
Yeah Ant
featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro
music is Space
Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All
content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.
View all episodes
By Ben Pfaff
5
11 ratings
Interview with Bob Lantz and Brian O'Connor of ON.LAB, about Mininet software for simulating networks.
Bob previously gave a talk about Mininet (slides,
video) at the
Open vSwitch 2015
Fall Conference.
Bob describes the mission of ON.LAB and how he ended up there. He talks
about introducing the idea of a network operating system to ON.LAB. He
mentioned that his interest in networks arose from a lecture by Nick
McKeown in the EE380 lecture series at Stanford, in which Nick stated:
“Networks are like hardware without an operating system,” which piqued
Bob's interest.
Brian relates his own experience getting involved with SDN, Mininet, and
ON.LAB.
Bob describes the genesis of Mininet by analogy to mobile device
development. Mobile device development is a pain because no one wants to
spend all their time with these tiny devices, so you use a simulator.
For network development, you need a simulator too because otherwise you
need a huge stack of expensive hardware. Mininet was directly inspired
by a network namespaces-based simulator developed in-house at Arista for
testing EOS.
Bob compares Mininet to Docker and other container systems. All of these
are container orchestration systems that make use of the “namespace”
and control group (cgroup) features of the Linux kernel. Mininet gives
more control over the network topology than the others.
Bob talks about limitations in OpenStack networking and what he'd like to
see OpenStack support in networking.
Brian describes a trend in NFV toward minimization, that is, reducing the
amount of overhead due to VMs, often by running in containers instead.
He speculates that containers might later be considered too heavyweight.
In Mininet, isolation is à la carte: the aspects of network isolation,
process isolation, and so on can all be configured independently, so that
users do not experience overhead that is not needed for a particular
application.
Bob talks about the scale that Mininet can achieve and that users
actually want to simulate in practice and contrasts it against the scale
(and particular diameter) of real networks. Versus putting each switch
in a VM, Bob says that Mininet allows for up to two orders of magnitude
scale improvement. His original vision was to simulate the entire
Stanford network of 25,000 nodes on a rack of machines. Bob talks about
distributed systems built on Mininet, which are not officially integrated
into Mininet. Distributed Mininet clusters are a work in progress. In
general, Mininet scales better than most controllers.
Bob compares Mininet to ns3. ns3
was originally a cycle-accurate simulator, but this made it hard to
connect to real hardware and run in real time, so it has moved in a
direction where it works in a mode similar to Mininet.
Bob describes the Mininet development community, based on github pull
requests. Bob describes a paradox in which they'd like to accept
contributions but most of the patches that they receive are not of
adequate quality.
Bob talks about performance in OVS related to Mininet, as a review of his
previous talk, and especially related to how Mininet speaks to OVSDB.
The scale of Mininet doesn't interact well with the design of the OVS
command-line tool for configuring OVS, which doesn't expect thousands of
ports or perform well when they are present. Bob reports that creating
Linux veth devices is also
slow.
Bob describes how to generate traffic with Mininet: however you like!
Since you can run any application with Mininet, you can generate traffic
with any convenient software.
Brian's wish list: improving the support for clustering Mininet and the
ability to “dilate time” to make Mininet simulation more accurate to
specific hardware, and the ability to model the control network.
You can contact Brian via email. Bob
recommends emailing the Mininet mailing list to get in contact with him.
OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode is Drive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013 by Alex. The bumper music is
Yeah Ant
featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro
music is Space
Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All
content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.