Mininet Sample Workflow
Mininet enables you to quickly create, interact with, customize and share a software defined network prototype, and provides a smooth path to running on hardware. This page illustrates the basic Mininet workflow, and many additional details are available in the Mininet walkthrough, the OpenFlow tutorial, and Mininet documentation.
Creating a Network
You can create a network with a single command. For example,
sudo mn --switch ovs --controller ref --topo tree,depth=2,fanout=8 --test pingall
starts a network with a tree topology of depth 2 and fanout 8 (i.e. 64 hosts connected to 9 switches), using Open vSwitch switches under the control of the OpenFlow/Stanford reference controller, and runs the pingall
test to check connectivity between every pair of nodes. (This takes about 45 seconds on my laptop.)
Interacting with a Network
Mininet’s CLI allows you to control, and manage your entire virtual network from a single console. For example, the CLI command
mininet> h2 ping h3
tells host h2
to ping host h2
’s IP address. Any available Linux command or program can be run on any virtual host. You can easily start a web server on one host and make an HTTP request from another:
mininet> h2 python -m SimpleHTTPServer 80 >& /tmp/http.log &
mininet> h3 wget -O - h2
Customizing a Network
Mininet’s API allows you to create custom networks with a few lines of Python. For example, the following script
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | |
creates a small network (4 hosts, 3 switches), and pings one host from another (in about 4 seconds with the current version.)
The Mininet distribution includes several text-based and graphical (see above) applications which we hope will be instructive and inspire you to create cool and useful apps for your own network designs.
Sharing a Network
Mininet is distributed as a virtual machine (VM) image with all dependencies pre-installed, runnable on common virtual machine monitors such as VMware, Xen and VirtualBox. This provides a convenient container for distribution; once a prototype has been developed, the VM image may be distributed to others to run, examine and modify. A complete, compressed Mininet VM is about 1GB. (Mininet can also be installed natively - apt-get install mininet
on Ubuntu.) If you are reading a great SIGCOMM (or other) paper about a Software-Defined Network, wouldn’t you like to be able to click, download and run a living, breathing example of the system? If so, consider developing a Mininet version of your own system that you can share with others!
Running on Hardware
Once a design works on Mininet, it can be deployed on hardware for real-world use, testing and measurement.
To successfully port to hardware on the first try, every Mininet-emulated component must act in the same way as its corresponding physical one. The virtual topology should match the physical one; virtual Ethernet pairs must be replaced by link-level Ethernet connectivity. Hosts emulated as processes should be replaced by hosts with their own OS image. In addition, each emulated OpenFlow switch should be replaced by a physical one configured to point to the controller. However, the controller does not need to change. When Mininet is running, the controller “sees” a physical network of switches, made possible by an interface with well-defined state semantics.