OpenStackEmu — A cloud testbed combining network emulation with OpenStack and SDN

摘要

OpenStack has been widely acknowledged to be one of the most important open source cloud platforms. In order to perform experimentally driven research in the area of cloud and cloud networking, there is however a big gap, because most researchers do not have access to a large cloud deployment and cannot change networking or compute infrastructure in order to test their algorithms and protocols on a large-scale. We developed OpenStackEmu, which is to the best of our knowledge the first attempt that combines OpenStack infrastructure with a Software Defined Networking (SDN) based controller such as OpenDay-light and a large-scale network emulator CORE (Common Open Research Emulator). The OpenStack compute and control nodes are connected to the CORE emulation server using TUN/TAP interfaces that inject the control (e.g. for VM migration) and data (VM-to-VM traffic) packets into a customizable network topology that is emulated using configurable Open vSwitches using CORE emulator. Experimenters can define e.g. fat-tree or distributed data center topologies and study the behavior of real VMs and services in those VMs under different background loads and SDN routing policies. We integrated the data center traffic generator DCTGen that allows to generate realistic background traffic based on traces from real data centers. Experimenters can study the performance impact of different VM migration strategies or different routing and load balancing schemes on real VM and application performance using different emulated topologies. We believe that OpenStackEmu is an important tool for both the SDN and OpenStack community in order to evaluate the performance of novel algorithms and protocols in the area of cloud networking.