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.

VINI is related to the PlanetLab project. The VINI effort has produced three main artifacts:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 still works on PlanetLab.

Who can use VINI?

All PlanetLab users can now access the VINI testbed, and create virtual networks within their slices, via the SFA federation interface. If you already have a PlanetLab slice, and you wish to add some VINI nodes, the basic steps are as follows:

1. Download and install the SFI command-line tool.

2. Create the sfi_config file. Set the value of SFI_SM to:

   SFI_SM='http://www.vini-veritas.net:12346/'
   

3. Get an RSpec (resource specification) by running sfi.py resources. This will tell you the physical nodes and links on which it is possible to create slivers and virtual links.

4. Edit the RSpec to describe the resources to allocate to your slice. Add sliver tags to the nodes on which you want slivers, and vlink tags to the links on which you want to create virtual links between slivers.

5. Submit your resource request by running sfi.py create slice-HRN rspec-file. If this operation does not return an error message, then the resources have been added to your slice. You can see what resources are currently allocated by running sfi.py resources slice-HRN.

The above is just an outline. For more information, see the SFA User Guide.

What's the current status?

The VINI testbed currently consists of 42 nodes at 27 sites connected to the National LambdaRail, 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:

National LambdaRail deployment

Internet2 deployment

CESNET deployment