What is Mininet?

Mininet creates a realistic virtual network that runs a real kernel, a switch, and application code on a single machine (VM, cloud, or native), in seconds, with a single command. It normally is in the form of a virtual machine that can be loaded on your hypervisor, and it has its own tiny operating system with a single CLI command. It is a tool to create OpenFlow virtual switches and hosts. With Mininet, you can also create virtual hosts that could be connected to the virtual ports of virtual switches; once it connects them, it assigns them with IP addresses as well. It's a complete all-in-one test tool to use with OpenDaylight.

For those of you familiar with Dynamips, Mininet is a tool that is similar to the command tool of Dynamips. In this chapter, we will explore Mininet and learn how to use its features to test our SDN platform. Mininet requires only 1 GB of RAM, but you can assign more memory when building complex topologies.

After downloading Mininet, you need to import...