Set Up Your Own Virtual Network: A Virtual Box/Mininet Environment For SDN
Set Up Your Own Virtual Network: A Virtual Box/Mininet Environment For SDN
Mininet is a simulation environment that creates a realistic virtual network, running real kernel, and
switch and application code, on a single machine (VM, cloud or native), in seconds, with a single
command:
Throughout this course, you will use Mininet to set up and test network topologies. The information
below will help you set up your environment.
Setup VM
Install Vagrant, a wrapper for virtualization software like VirtualBox and VMWare
Install VirtualBox, your VM provider
Use Git to download course resources
This will start a basic mininet virtual environment with one switch (s1) and two hosts (h1 & h2). You
will now see a Mininet CLI. In this CLI, type:
$ xterm h1
$ xterm h2
You will see two new white terminal windows popping out.
If all this works out without any error, then we have successfully completed the Mininet Setup.
The VM runs 192.168.0.0/24 as default network, so if you use that network locally you need to
change it
The host machine needs to run an X server (it’s native on Linux; OS X and Win require the
installation of an X Server)
Basic Terminology
VirtualBox console terminal: connects to Mininet VM. This is the one created when you started up
the VM. You can't copy and paste from this page to the console terminal, so it's a bit of a pain.
Minimize this NOW, if you haven't already done so. Once you've used it to set up networking, it won't
be needed.
SSH terminal: connects to Mininet VM. Created by using putty on Windows or SSH on OS X / Linux,
as described in the previous section. Copy and paste should work on this terminal.
xterm terminal: connects to a host in the virtual network. Will be labeled at the top with the name of
the host.