OVS and Mininet

Mininet is a tool that can emulate a realistic network on a single machine or VM with CLI support to interact with and API to customize, extend it. Mininet supports creating virtual hosts linking them to switch and hooking it up with a controller. It does all of this leveraging the same underlying components and techniques we used to in the previous example for network namespace-based virtual network. Refer to http://mininet.org/overview/.

You have two options to install the mininet tool:

• Using the Ubuntu apt-get command:

  $ sudo apt-get install mininet
  

• Install from the source code

  $ git clone git://github.com/mininet/mininet.git 
  $ util/install.sh -fnv
  

We recommend using the first option.

In this example, we will create a Mininet setup and check the actions it performs to the Open vSwitch to emulate network.

Let us create a Mininet network with a switch and a couple of hosts, connect it to controller, and check out the underlying actions it does to accomplish the virtual network...