About VINI
What is VINI?
VINI is a virtual network infrastructure that allows network researchers to evaluate their protocols and services in the wide area. VINI allows researchers to deploy and evaluate their ideas with real routing software, traffic loads, and network events. To provide researchers flexibility in designing their experiments, VINI supports simultaneous experiments with arbitrary network topologies on a shared physical infrastructure.
Specifically, VINI is a PlanetLab-like testbed where users can configure virtual topologies within their slices. A VINI virtual topology consists of virtual machines (a.k.a. slivers on PlanetLab) connected by point-to-point virtual links. Applications running inside the VINI slice can send and receive traffic over the virtual topology, and also control how packets are forwarded within the topology. Thus, it is possible to run open-source routing software like Quagga inside the VINI slice to create a full-featured routing overlay.
VINI is related to the PlanetLab project. The VINI effort has produced three main artifacts:
A testbed that is distinct from the public PlanetLab. VINI is an instance of a "private PlanetLab" that uses MyPLC to manage the nodes. The VINI nodes offer more bandwidth (1Gbps) than most public PlanetLab nodes.
A set of extensions to the PlanetLab kernel and tools called Trellis. Trellis integrates virtual network topologies and slices. Note that currently Trellis only runs on the VINI infrastructure mentioned above, not on PlanetLab. However we are working with the PlanetLab team to roll out VINI-style virtual topologies on PlanetLab in the near future.
The initial proof-of-concept toolkit, described in our SIGCOMM'06 paper, called PL-VINI. This toolkit leverages Click, User-Mode Linux, XORP, and Quagga to build routing overlays inside slices on the public PlanetLab. This prototype is no longer being actively developed, but it should still work on PlanetLab.
Who can use VINI?
VINI is part of the PlanetLab federation of testbeds. This means that all PlanetLab users can now access the VINI testbed, and create virtual networks within their slices, via the SFA federation interface.
How can I configure a virtual topology on VINI?
Please read the VINI User's Guide for instructions on how to get started with VINI.What's the current status?
The VINI testbed currently consists of 26 nodes at 14 sites connected to Internet2 and CESNET (Czech Republic). The Trellis software runs on all VINI nodes. To see which Internet2-connected VINI nodes are up, click here (real-time status monitoring provided by the CoMon project).The maps below show our current VINI deployments:
Internet2 deployment
CESNET deployment
