Installing Indigo Virtual Switch in Mininet 2.1.0

Mininet 2.1.0 has been released with many new improvement and features.  One of the new features is experimental support of  Indigo Virtual Switch (IVS).  By default, the Mininet 2.1.0 VM does not include IVS.  But to add this, it’s a simple few steps.

1. Login to your Mininet VM as ‘mininet’.
2. Make sure you Mininet VM has access to the Internet.  Just try and ping something to see if it works.
3. In your mininet home directory, run the command mininet/util/install.sh -i

Once the installer finished, IVS should be installed.  You can check if the installation worked by running the command ivs-ctl help.

Now to try it out, we’ll copy the emptynet.py to your home directory and make a few modifications to it.

Add the import for the IVS node.

from mininet.node IVSSwitch

Then change the following line

    s3 = net.addSwitch( 's3' )

to look like the following.

    s3 = net.addSwitch( 's3', cls=IVSSwitch )

Now run the new network.

sudo ./emptynet.py

If it started successfully, you should see switch s3 show up in IVS by running ivs-ctl show in another window.

mininet@mininet-vm:~$ ivs-ctl show
ovs-system:
  kernel lookups: hit=60 missed=116 lost=0
  kernel flows=0
  ports:
    0 ovs-system (internal)
      rx: packets=0 bytes=0 errors=0 dropped=0
      tx: packets=0 bytes=0 errors=0 dropped=0
s3:
  kernel lookups: hit=0 missed=10 lost=0
  kernel flows=0
  ports:
    0 s3 (internal)
      rx: packets=0 bytes=0 errors=0 dropped=0
      tx: packets=0 bytes=0 errors=0 dropped=0
    1 s3-eth1
      rx: packets=5 bytes=378 errors=0 dropped=0
      tx: packets=5 bytes=378 errors=0 dropped=0
    2 s3-eth2
      rx: packets=5 bytes=378 errors=0 dropped=0
      tx: packets=5 bytes=378 errors=0 dropped=0