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 2.3.0d6

Containernet website: https://containernet.github.io/
Mininet website: 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:

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)

Bibtex:

@inproceedings{peuster2016medicine, 
    author={M. Peuster and H. Karl and S. van Rossem}, 
    booktitle={2016 IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN)}, 
    title={MeDICINE: Rapid prototyping of production-ready network services in multi-PoP environments}, 
    year={2016}, 
    volume={}, 
    number={}, 
    pages={148-153}, 
    doi={10.1109/NFV-SDN.2016.7919490},
    month={Nov}
}

NFV multi-PoP Extension

There is an extension of Containernet called vim-emu which is a full-featured multi-PoP emulation platform for NFV scenarios that was developed as part of the SONATA-NFV project and is now hosted by the OpenSource MANO project.

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
- 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!
Expose container ports and set environment variables of containers through Python API
Traffic control links (delay, bw, loss, jitter)
Automated unit tests for all new features
Automated installation based on Ansible playbook

Installation

Bare-metal installation

Automatic installation is provided through an Ansible playbook.

Requires: Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS

$ sudo apt-get install ansible git aptitude
$ git clone https://github.com/ramonfontes/containernet.git
$ cd containernet/ansible
$ sudo ansible-playbook -i "localhost," -c local install.yml
$ cd ..
$ sudo python setup.py install

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/containernet_example.py
use: containernet> d1 ifconfig to see config of container d1

Docker

Build:

docker build . -t containernetwifi

And run example:

docker run --rm --name containernet-wifi -it --privileged --pid=host -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v /sys:/sys -v /lib/modules:/lib/modules --network=host containernetwifi examples/containernet_wifi.py

or bash:

docker run --rm --name containernet-wifi -it --privileged --pid=host -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v /sys:/sys -v /lib/modules:/lib/modules --network=host containernetwifi /bin/bash

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

Contact

Support

If you have any questions, please use GitHub's issue system or Containernet's 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

cyberpunkych/containernet