Containernet

Containernet: Mininet fork that allows to use Docker containers as hosts in emulated networks

This fork of Mininet allows to use Docker containers as Mininet hosts. This enables interesting functionalities to built networking/cloud testbeds. The integration is done by subclassing the original Host class.

Based on: Mininet 2.2.1

Mininet: http://mininet.org
Original Mininet repository: https://github.com/mininet/mininet

Cite this work

If you use Containernet for your research and/or other publications, please cite (beside the original Mininet paper) the following paper to reference our work:

Manuel Peuster, Holger Karl, and Steven van Rossem. "MeDICINE: Rapid Prototyping of Production-Ready Network Services in Multi-PoP Environments." in IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Network (NFV-SDN), 2016.
- Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7919490/
- Pre-print: http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05995

NFV multi-PoP Extension

There is an extension of Containernet called MeDICINE which is a full-featured multi-PoP emulation platform for NFV scenarios which is developed as part of the SONATA project.

MeDICINE platform repository: https://github.com/sonata-nfv/son-emu
SONATA project: http://www.sonata-nfv.eu

Features

Add, remove Docker containers to Mininet topologies
Connect Docker containers to topology (to switches, other containers, or legacy Mininet hosts )
Execute commands inside Docker containers by using the Mininet CLI
Dynamic topology changes (lets behave like a small cloud ;-) )
Add Hosts/Docker containers to a running Mininet topology
Connect Hosts/Docker containers to a running Mininet topology
Remove Hosts/Docker containers/Links from a running Mininet topology
Resource limitation of Docker containers
CPU limitation with Docker CPU share option
CPU limitation with Docker CFS period/quota options
Memory/swap limitation
Change CPU/mem limitations at runtime!
Traffic control links (delay, bw, loss, jitter)
(missing: TCLink support for dynamically added containers/hosts)
Automated unit tests for all new features
Automated installation based on Ansible playbook

Installation

Automatic installation is provided through an Ansible playbook.

Requires: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install ansible git aptitude
sudo vim /etc/ansible/hosts
Add: localhost ansible_connection=local
git clone https://github.com/containernet/containernet.git
cd containernet/ansible
sudo ansible-playbook install.yml
Wait (and have a coffee) ...

Usage / Run

Start example topology with some empty Docker containers connected to the network.

cd containernet
run: sudo python examples/dockerhosts.py
use: containernet> d1 ifconfig to see config of container d1

Topology example

In your custom topology script you can add Docker hosts as follows:

info('*** Adding docker containers\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", cpu_period=50000, cpu_quota=25000)
d3 = net.addHost('d3', ip='11.0.0.253', cls=Docker, dimage="ubuntu:trusty", cpu_shares=20)
d4 = net.addDocker('d4', dimage="ubuntu:trusty", volumes=["/:/mnt/vol1:rw"])

Tests

There is a set of Containernet specific unit tests located in mininet/test/test_containernet.py. To run these, do:

sudo py.test -v mininet/test/test_containernet.py

Vagrant support

Using the provided Vagrantfile is the most simple way to run and test Containernet:

git clone https://github.com/containernet/containernet.git
cd containernet
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

Work based on Containernet

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.
- http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7543832/
- https://github.com/ysqiao/doopnet

Contact

Manuel Peuster manuel (dot) peuster (at) upb (dot) de

souvikdas95 / containernet