Containernet is a fork of the famous Mininet network emulator and allows to use Docker containers as hosts in emulated network topologies. This enables interesting functionalities to build networking/cloud emulators and testbeds. Containernet is actively used by the research community, focussing on experiments in the field of cloud computing, fog computing, network function virtualization (NFV) and multi-access edge computing (MEC). One example for this is the NFV multi-PoP infrastructure emulator which was created by the SONATA-NFV project and is now part of the OpenSource MANO (OSM) project.

• Add, remove Docker containers to Mininet topologies
• Connect Docker containers to topology (to switches, other containers, or legacy Mininet hosts)
• Execute commands inside containers by using the Mininet CLI
• Dynamic topology changes
  • Add hosts/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 installation based on Ansible playbook

Containernet comes with two installation and deployment options.

This option is the most flexible. Your machine should run Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Python3.

First install Ansible:

sudo apt-get install ansible

Then clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/containernet/containernet.git

Finally run the Ansible playbook to install required dependencies:

sudo ansible-playbook -i "localhost," -c local containernet/ansible/install.yml

After the installation finishes, you should be able to get started.

Containernet can be executed within a privileged Docker container (nested container deployment). There is also a pre-build Docker image available on Docker Hub.

Attention: Container resource limitations, e.g. CPU share limits, are not supported in the nested container deployment. Use bare-metal installations if you need those features.

You can build the container locally:

docker build -t containernet/containernet .

or alternatively pull the latest pre-build container:

docker pull containernet/containernet

You can then directly start the default containernet example:

docker run --name containernet -it --rm --privileged --pid='host' -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock containernet/containernet

or run an interactive container and drop to the shell:

docker run --name containernet -it --rm --privileged --pid='host' -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock containernet/containernet /bin/bash

Using Containernet is very similar to using Mininet.

Make sure you are in the containernet directory. You can start an example topology with some empty Docker containers connected to the network:

sudo python3 examples/containernet_example.py

After launching the emulated network, you can interact with the involved containers through Mininet's interactive CLI. You can for example:

• use containernet> d1 ifconfig to see the config of container d1
• use containernet> d1 ping -c4 d2 to ping between containers

You can exit the CLI using containernet> exit.

Let's simulate a webserver and a client making requests. For that, we need a server and client image. First, change into the containernet/examples/basic_webserver directory.

Containernet already provides a simple Python server for testing purposes. To build the server image, just run

docker build -f Dockerfile.server -t test_server:latest .

If you have not added your user to the docker group as described here, you will need to prepend sudo.

We further need a basic client to make a CURL request. Containernet provides that as well. Please run

docker build -f Dockerfile.client -t test_client:latest .

Now that we have a server and client image, we can create hosts using them. You can either checkout the topology script demo.py first or run it directly:

sudo python3 demo.py

If everything worked, you should be able to see following output:

Execute: client.cmd("time curl 10.0.0.251")
Hello world.

You can also add hosts with resource restrictions or mounted volumes:

# ...

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"])

# ...

Containernet's documentation can be found in the GitHub wiki. The documentation for the underlying Mininet project can be found on the Mininet website.

Containernet has been used for a variety of research tasks and networking projects. If you use Containernet, let us know!

If you use Containernet for your work, please cite the following publication:

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}
}

• 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. IEEE. (2016)

• S. v. Rossem, W. Tavernier, M. Peuster, D. Colle, M. Pickavet and P. Demeester: Monitoring and debugging using an SDK for NFV-powered telecom applications. IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN), Palo Alto, CA, USA, Demo Session. IEEE. (2016)

• Qiao, Yuansong, et al. Doopnet: An emulator for network performance analysis of Hadoop clusters using Docker and Mininet. Computers and Communication (ISCC), 2016 IEEE Symposium on. IEEE. (2016)

• M. Peuster, S. Dräxler, H. Razzaghi, S. v. Rossem, W. Tavernier and H. Karl: A Flexible Multi-PoP Infrastructure Emulator for Carrier-grade MANO Systems. In IEEE 3rd Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft) Demo Track . (2017) Best demo award!

• M. Peuster and H. Karl: Profile Your Chains, Not Functions: Automated Network Service Profiling in DevOps Environments. IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN), Berlin, Germany. IEEE. (2017)

• M. Peuster, H. Küttner and H. Karl: Let the state follow its flows: An SDN-based flow handover protocol to support state migration. In IEEE 4th Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft). IEEE. (2018) Best student paper award!

• M. Peuster, J. Kampmeyer and H. Karl: Containernet 2.0: A Rapid Prototyping Platform for Hybrid Service Function Chains. In IEEE 4th Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft) Demo, Montreal, Canada. (2018)

• M. Peuster, M. Marchetti, G. García de Blas, H. Karl: Emulation-based Smoke Testing of NFV Orchestrators in Large Multi-PoP Environments. In IEEE European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC), Lubljana, Slovenia. (2018)

• S. Schneider, M. Peuster,Wouter Tvernier and H. Karl: A Fully Integrated Multi-Platform NFV SDK. In IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN) Demo, Verona, Italy. (2018)

• M. Peuster, S. Schneider, Frederic Christ and H. Karl: A Prototyping Platform to Validate and Verify Network Service Header-based Service Chains. In IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN) 5GNetApp, Verona, Italy. (2018)

• S. Schneider, M. Peuster and H. Karl: A Generic Emulation Framework for Reusing and Evaluating VNF Placement Algorithms. In IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN), Verona, Italy. (2018)

• M. Peuster, S. Schneider, D. Behnke, M. Müller, P-B. Bök, and H. Karl: Prototyping and Demonstrating 5G Verticals: The Smart Manufacturing Case. In IEEE 5th Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft) Demo, Paris, France. (2019)

• M. Peuster, M. Marchetti, G. Garcia de Blas, Holger Karl: Automated testing of NFV orchestrators against carrier-grade multi-PoP scenarios using emulation-based smoke testing. In EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking (2019)

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

For running Mininet or Containernet distributed in a cluster, checkout Maxinet.

You can also find an alternative/teaching-focused approach for Container-based Network Emulation by TU Dresden in their repository.

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

Your contributions are very welcome! Please fork the GitHub repository and create a pull request.

Please make sure to test your code using

sudo make test

Manuel Peuster

• Mail: <manuel (at) peuster (dot) de>
• Twitter: @ManuelPeuster
• GitHub: @mpeuster
• Website: https://peuster.de