Datacenter in a Box: Test Your SDN Cloud-Datacenter Controller at Home

In the last years, the widespread of Cloud computing as the main paradigm to deliver a large plethora of virtualized services significantly increased the complexity of Datacenters management and raised new performance issues for the intra-Datacenter network. Providing heterogeneous services and satisfying users´ experience is really challenging for Cloud service providers, since system (IT resources) and network administration functions are definitely separated. As the Software Defined Networking (SDN) approach seems to be a promising way to address innovation in Datacenters, the paper presents a new framework that allows to develop and test new OpenFlow -- based controllers for Cloud Datacenters. More specifically, our framework enhances both Mininet (a well -- known SDN emulator) and POX (a network controller written in python), with all the extensions necessary to experiment novel control and management strategies of IT and network resources.