Design and Implementation of a Network Supporting Environment for Virtual Experimental Platforms

Traditional experimental platforms, which are built based on physical machines, have many disadvantages on diversity, security and repeatability. The development of virtual experimental platforms proposed a solution to this problem, but the construction of the network supporting environment remains a challenging task. This paper presents the design and implementation of a virtual network supporting environment called RuViseNet, which is originally designed to but not limited to support our virtualized experimental platform called RuVisen. Based on virtual machine technologies, RuViseNet achieves network virtualization in the data-link layer by way of capture, modification and forwarding of Ethernet packets. Meanwhile it designs and implements the operation of start/shutdown/save/load for virtual networks with an effective way of controlling virtual machine lifecycles, which provides support both for fast recovery and users´ efficiency. The development of RuViseNet implements a good support of virtualized experimental platform for research and product testing.