Tuesday March 04, 2008
Tuesday March 04, 2008 Virtual Wire: Network in a Box (Sun Tech Day in Hyderabad)
Virtual Wire: Network in a Box (Sun Tech Day in Hyderabad)
I did a session for developers during the Sun Tech Day in Hyderabad and Raju Alluri had printed out 100 copies of the workshop and we were carrying 100 DVDs with Crossbow iso images (they are available on web here. The people just loved it. We had sooo underestimated the demand that printouts and DVDs disappeared in less than a minute. I had a presentation that included 30 odd slides but I couldn't even go past slide 7 since the workshop was so interesting to people. And between the tech day presentation and user group meeting in the evening, people pointed out a lot of interesting uses and why this can be such a powerful thing.
The idea that you can create any arbitrarily complex physical network as a virtual wire and run your favorite workload, do performance analysis and debug it is very appealing to people. Remember that we are not simulating the network. This is the real thing i.e. real applications running and real packets flowing. If you application runs on any OS, it will run on this virtual network and will send and receive real packets!!
The concept is pretty useful even to people like us because now we don't need to pester our lab staff to create us a network for us to test or experiment on. And best part is, we can use xVM and run Linux and Windows as hosts as well.
We are thinking of writing a book which reinvents how you learn networking in schools and universities. And oh by the way, do people really care about CCNA now that they can do all this on their laptop :) If someone is interested in contributing real examples for this workshop module and the book, you are more than welcome. Just drop us a line.
networking virtualization crossbow (2008-03-04 18:05:48.0) Permalink Comments [5]
