Mininet, to try OpenFlow and SDN on one machine

Seen recently via Twitter. Looks interesting. I had blogged about OpenFlow and Software Defined Networking some time ago.

Mininet "is the easy way to do cool stuff with OpenFlow and Software-Defined Networks. Run a complete network on a single machine (VM, cloud, or native) with a single command:

sudo mn

The Mininet site goes on to say:

"You can interact with your network using the Mininet API and CLI, customize it, share it with others, or deploy it on real hardware.
Actively developed and supported, Mininet is useful for interactive development, testing, and demos, running any OpenFlow controller or virtual switch. Permissive BSD license."

Some (but not all) of the links (not shown above) in the previous paragraph, say "fixme", meaning there is no link yet.

Wikipedia article about OpenFlow.

Vasudev Ram

Linux hardware commoditization and OS virtualization enabled cloud computing

http://m.wired.com/epicenter/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/1

Good observation by Marc Andreessen.

(Incidentally, I came across two articles about him today, and both glossed over or did not mention that his startup Opsware (reportedly) sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion.)

Huge use of cheap PC servers running free or relatively cheap Linux distributions is one of the big reasons for the existence of the many useful web services we take for granted today.
 

Article - Introduction to virtualization

http://kernelthread.com/publications/virtualization/

It's by Amit Singh, CEO of stealth mode startup  osmeta, which I blogged about recently.

- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com

Silverline from Librato

https://silverline.librato.com/

Interesting concept / product. Involves "workload virtualization" or application-centric virtualization. Have not dug into the details but it caught my attention because part of the description reminded me, very roughly, of HP Process Resource Manager (PRM) for HP-UX, a Hewlett-Packard product, that, IIRC, could let you set limits on the amount of machine resources (such CPU or memory) that a process or application could use. That was a feature, I had read, that was not common on UNIX till then, though it already existed on mainframes. And it seemed like a useful feature to help guarantee that critical apps got the resources they needed.