VNM Development Tools and Demo

VNM Development Tools and Demo.

 Technologies such as Crossbow make OpenSolaris an attractive proposition for ISV/OEMs in the networking device space. Coupled with existing Solaris features like  Solaris Containers ISV/OEMs can build Virtual Network Machines (VNM) using OpenSolaris that allows:

• Building specific networking functionality.
• Consolidating multiple instances of same networking functionalities
• Consolidating instances of completely different networking functionalities on the same system.

 An important aspect of the VNM project is the utilities that make it easier for administering VNMs. It is possible that some of the ISV/OEMs have their own management framework which uses undelying Solaris commands and API to manage VNM.

 However, for those not very familiar with Solaris, this effort aims to come up with a set of tools that makes configuring and managing VNMs simple.

 The basic set of requirements identified for managing VNMs include:

• Displaying existing VNMs on the system
• Creating and configuring new VNMs.
• Modifying existing VNMs.
• Deleteing existing VNMs.
• Partioning resources such as bandwidth, CPUs etc. between VNMs.
• Show statistics (real time and historical) for VNMs

 This effort plans to deliver an initial set of utilities to create and configure a VNM; currently the targeted functionalities include Router and Firewall.

 The utilities will be high level commands which will use commands provided by OpenSolaris. These utilities will work at the VNM level and should be extensible so that users can use these as building blocks to add specific functionalites rapidly.

 The effort will look at providing these utilities as CLIs and also Webmin modules. We look forward to participation from folks in the form of ideas, suggestions and tools to make this a repository of utilities for administering different types of VNMs.