Microsoft Azure unofficially supports nested virtualization using KVM on Linux virtual machines, which makes it possible to build network emulation scenarios in the cloud using the same technologies you would use if you were using your own PC or a local server. In this post, I will show you how to set up a Linux […]
Many open-source network simulation and emulation tools use full virtualization technologies like VMware, QEMU/KVM, or VirtualBox. These technologies require hardware support for virtualization such as Intel’s VT-x and AMD’s AMD-V. To gain direct access to this hardware support, researchers usually run network emulation test beds on their own PCs or servers but could not take
Google Cloud Platform introduced nested virtualization support in September 2017. Nested virtualization is especially interesting to network emulation research since it allow users to run unmodified versions of popular network emulation tools like GNS3, EVE-NG, and Cloonix on a cloud instance. Google Cloud supports nested virtualization using the KVM hypervisor on Linux instances. It does
I recently added a status indicator to my azruntime application. If users have a lot of VMs in their subscriptions, the azruntime application can take a long time to run. Users will appreciate seeing the status so they know the program is still running and is not hung up. I used the Rich library to
I wrote a new Python script called azruntime. It helps me manage my Azure VMs. The script is open-source and should work for anyone who also uses the Azure CLI. azruntime is available on my azure-scripts GitHub repository. I learned a lot about the Azure Python SDK while working on the azruntime project. In this
Python programming is now a required skill for network engineers. I recorded videos of myself as I learned and practiced Python programming. I think these videos, along with the links to learning resources associated with each video’s topic, serve as a good learning guide for network engineers getting started with Python programming. This post collects
Many network engineers and other professionals are transitioning their skills set to include programming and automation. Commonly, their previous programming experience comes from a few programming courses they attended in university a long time ago. I am one of those professionals and I created this Python programming guide for people like you and me. In
Antidote is the network emulator that runs the labs on the Network Reliability Labs web site. You may install a standalone version of Antidote on your personal computer using the Vagrant virtual environment provisioning tool. In this post, I show you how to run Antidote on a Linux system with KVM, instead of VirtualBox, on
I want to show you how to configure a host server so, when it is shut down, it executes a script that runs commands on any running virtual machines before the host tries to stop them. I will configure the host server to wait until the script completes configuring the virtual machines before continuing with
Antidote is a network emulator combined with a presentation framework. It was designed to create and deliver networking technology training. Its user interface operates in a web browser, including the terminals that students use to run commands on emulated network devices and servers. Antidote is the engine that runs the Network Reliability Labs web site.