Network simulator softwares

Software developers and network engineers use vrnetlab, along with continuous-integration processes, for testing network provisioning changes in a virtual network. Researchers and engineers may also use the vrnetlab command line interface to create and modify network emulation labs in an interactive way. Please click here to see my posts about vrnetlab. Wistar is an open-source network emulator originally developed by Juniper Networks and released under the Apache license.

Wistar also supports Linux virtual machines and, interestingly, uses cloud-init to configure them from the Wistar user interface.

Wistar also supports generic virtual appliances, in a basic way. Please click here to see my posts about Wistar. Linux provides many different ways to build a network emulator using open-source virtualization technology and tools.

Many of the network emulators described in this blog us some of the tools mentioned above to implement their functionality. Please click here to see my posts about building your own network emulator. Containernet is a fork of the Mininet network emulator that allows you to use Docker containers as hosts in emulated network topologies.

The Knet network emulator uses Docker containers to build network nodes, and it uses Open vSwitch to create switches. KNet has both a CLI and a web interface. The Educational Network Simulator is a very simple educational network simulator intended to be used with year old students.

Labtainers is a network emulator based on Docker containers that also provides many prepared labs that focus on cybersecurity scenarios. NetMirage is a network emulator developed at the University of Waterloo in Canada. It is currently available as an open beta. Similar to other network emulators, NetMirage allows users to run real code to test IP applications. The NetMirage developers are currently using it to construct large-scale virtual Tor networks.

Netsim is a network simulator framework for Rust programmers who need to test their networking code. See more details about YANS. There have been no updates in two years. After releasing the first version, it has not been updated in two years. Marionnet allows users to define, configure and run complex computer networks on a host computer.

Marionnet seems designed to be used as an education tool and has an attractive graphical user interface, and some sample practice lab configurations. The Marionnet project released a new version, 0. Psimulator2 is a Java-based network simulator useful for basic networking education. It is an old project, recently forked a couple of times by different developers so, hopefully, we will see some active development in the future. It has not been updated in four years.

LStacker is builds virtual networks consisting of containers and bridges. It supports both LXC and Docker containers. It was created three years ago but has not been updated since. I cannot wait for all the missing evaluations, this web site does exactly what I wanted to do but failed to find the time for it.

I am not even sure about my own vision of these word definitions emulation, and simulation , clearer definitions could be put on this web site. I wanted to find this site! Now I can see an emulator is really want I need. But sometimes you have to think about what the end user is going to search for. Based on what I know about all the tools in this list, I think that GNS3 is the only system that will work on Windows.

The instructor will have to do some work to create the system and simplify the desktop setup so that the complexities of using an unfamiliar operating system are hidden from the students but as soon as IMUNES or CORE is started, the students will be using the application and not worrying about running Unix BSD Unix commands.

Is these emulator or simulation tool will help me to do my job?? If so, use GNS3 or Cloonix. If the system runs on top of Linux, you may be able to use containers so you could use CORE in that case. Thanks, Brian. Appreciate any suggestions or things to avoid. Thanks Maurice. This is a great article and information for people who are like me Developers by nature but still want to have a edge on the networking concepts. I feel bad I have missed it for so long. Hi Vijay, Thanks for your interest in this blog.

I have almost completed my survey of open-source network simulators so, over the next few months, I will begin discussing examples of simulated networking scenarios. I hope you and your team will find this blog to be useful. It also offers a useful selection of other Linux software and tools pre-installed. I have tested it. Without configuring anything, you can do the same things that with Cloonix or NetKit with VisualNetkit. One of its advantages is that nothing is installed, modified or deleted on your own OS.

I fixed my contact e-mail address. And, thanks for the extra information about Live Raizo. I think Live Raizo is a good project. They also make it easier to use GNS3 to build simulation scenarios. Brian: You have a great resource here. Thanks for making all this info available.

I want to connect openNMS to an emulator and then have the emulator run simple scenarios that present a network admin with various types of problems to diagnose and correct. Any suggestions would be most appreciated. Thanks Larry. Hi Larry, Thanks for your question. I think you should use a network emulator that runs either KVM or user-mode linux.

So use either Cloonix or Netkit. Brian: Thanks for the feedback. Thanks again Larry. Larry, Thanks. I think the main issue is virtualization of the file system.

Cloonix and Netkit use KVM and user-mode-linux, respectively and those technologies virtualize the full filesystem and allow you to save the changes to the files for future use. Good point, David! GNS3 would also be a good tool for this case. I have a few posts on using open-source routers in GNS3.

Click on the GNS3 tag to find them. I had posted the same question on an openNMS forum and gotten zero responses so I really appreciate the info being provided here.

I think for my needs the best fit will be something that is fairly broad in scope e. The idea is to get a basic network emulation going and than interface to it via openNMS.

My understanding is that Cloonix is pretty easy to set up and use, allows the use of standard Linux networking tools e. I prefer cloonix for working with open-source routers, in the case where full-stack virtualization is needed using KVM. Both cloonix and GNS3 provide high-fidelity network simulation because they allow you to work with virtual machines running real networking software.

Cloonix is more streamlined for use with open-source routers and other open-source software, which I think fits better with your use-case for working with OpenNMS.

Hi Brian, Thanks for this great article. I test access multiplexers and would like to create a network of guest hosts, each with their own IP. The purpose of this is to try to congest multiplexer-under-test with TCP traffic. There will be a simulated PC for each of the modems connected to a multiplexer-under-test that supports between modems. I would then like to set up a packet TCP generator or an FTP server on the uplink of the multiplexer, where the guest hosts would then simultaneously download files from the server.

You need to do some testing to determine which options work best for you. In my opinion, you need a hypervisor like Xen, KVM, of VMWare or you can use Linux containers maybe use Docker , which use less systme resources than full VMs and may allow you to run more virtual test nodes per host machine.

Set up your VMs and connect them all to the 10G port. Even then, I would recommend other tools like chef or puppet or use shell scripts instead of a network simulator for your test system because it seems you will need more functionality related to virtual server setup automation instead of simulating different network topologies.

Thanks for quick reply, Brian. I mostly use python for automation scripting. Or do I use tools like Jmeter? You will have to do some testing, I think. You can create a set of virtual servers that all connect to the external Ethernet interface on the host machine. You can create a custom service type that supports starting an FTP client and then running some download commands. When you save the network scenario, you can re-load it at a later date to run the same test again.

Is there any free network simulator software that I can use as a tool to develop and demonstrate a working IPS within a simulation? Hi Adam, Thanks for your question. What protocols do you intend to use in your solution?

If you can describe your needs in terms of the technology you need to emulate, you may be more successful in finding answers. We are working on implementing communication network testbed for a smart grid system. Can you please recommend an emulation tool with realistic performance and which is not complicated to configure? I think your requirements exceed the capabilities that the open-source tools that I know about can provide.

I have working in research about detecting a malicious router that can attack autonomous system AS so I want to simulate simple AS with some routers and simulate a malicious router that drop the traffic maliciously I want to select the simulator to use it in this research , some ones advice me to use NS2 simulator.

I think you will want to run real software on virtual nodes in this scenario so I recommend you use a network emulator for your project. You should choose a network emulator that uses virtualization technology and scripting languages you are comfortable using. If you need a recommendation I can say that CORE and Cloonix are easy to use and should meet your requirement to run BGP routing software on different nodes in an emulated network.

But any of the other emulators except for Psimulator will also work for you. I am research student. I want make simulation about surveillance camera in WIMAX , can you help me which program can be effective and easy to use.

Thanks for this overview. I have not used it yet but it was recommended and seems to have won a few awards in A new beta is quite current. Cheers Christian. So, I did not list it among the set of open-source simulators on this page. Thanks for you post. This means that each node does not have its own filesystem upon which you can install apps.

You need to install applications on your host computer, like I do in my post about installing CORE services. Then, when you start a virtual node in the CORE Network Emulator, that node can run the app in a separate process namespace. Also you need to be aware of how CORE sets up configuration files in the filesystem for each service that runs, especially if you will create your own custom services. Remember, you should not just start a process on a CORE node.

I encountered the same problems I suspect you will encounter. We should be able to introduce heavy errors for retransmission such as packet drop, congestion, etc.

Which of these will be a better fit? Someone from work recommended ns Please help. Thank you Sean. Hi Sean, If you need results that are consistently reproducible, you should use a discreet-event network simulator like NS If you can accept some variability in measured performance then it is much easier to use a simulator like those listed on this page.

Thanks for this list of NS. It contribute and simplify the work of find a suitable tool for networking teaching. Best work. You will need to set up the packet core network functionality yourself, regardless of which simulation p,at form you use.

I hope that helps. It is written in Python so you can modify it as you need to. You may also look at Mininet. I hope your research is successful. I suggest that you look at the RouteFlow project for some inspiration. I am working on a student project and want to simulate some IP-based fast reroute techniques, can you recommend a simulator that can help me?

I appreciate any advice you give me! Hi Jiadai, Fast-reroute techniques are implemented by the routers you emulate. So the simulation tool you use is not a factor in making this work.

I have read some papers about IP-based fast reroute techniques. So how I can make the simulation work to evaluate those mechanisms? I am still a newbie, hope you can give me some hints. ECMP is implemented in the Linux networking stack and it is probably one of the fast reroute technologies covered in the papers you read.

Regards, Brian. I suggest you post your question to the Cloonix mailing list. I am sorry to say that there has been a cloonix mailing list once, but now, the list is closed. There is very little communication around cloonix apart from this blog here. Do not hesitate, Brian to forward anything concerning cloonix to the cloonix team. The mail you transmitted about saving and configuration was good for the product progress, the needs we have here usin the tool is not the same as the needs other people may have.

Here we never save a topology, we just scritp its construction and send configuration commands to virtual machines always starting from virgin reference guests. Thanks Brian for this blog. Sorry about that, next version 29 will have the save function back. The rewriting and simplification of cloonix had side-effects. This way you can test security with different distributions, kernels, and even with operations systems like Windows.

Yes, i have used VirtualBox but not real scenario. In all except openwrt, you can install gcc, compile and run your patched software. You can also update your virtual machines at any time providing the host in which cloonix server is running has an internet connection. The next version of cloonix v29 will be available before chrismas. I think it depends on how you will set up your test scenario. Will you be modifying the Linux kernel? Will you run modified networking stacks on some of the nodes on the network?

If you need to run a lot of nodes in the simulating or will all use the same kernel and networking software, use a simulator based on containers, like CORE or Mininet. If you need performance accuracy and reproduceable measurements of performance, I suggest you use a discreet-event simulator like NS-2 or NS Hi Brian, I am working on M.

I want to setup ipv6 bgp scenario and analyze route reflector and ibgp performance on heavy traffic loads.

Earlier,I have simulated ipv4 bgp in ns2 but now i am not able to scale it in ipv6. Please suggest. Hi Shipra, I need to know more about the simulation scenario you want to create. I assume that, since you are using NS-2, you need a discreet-event simulator so only NS-2 or NS-3 would work for you because they are the only discreet-event open-source network simulators I know about.

Since you wish to simulatate heavy workloads, I think a simulator like NS-2 or NS-3 is the best solution because using an emulator to run heavy workloads may not provide reproducible results. Is there any tool that i can use to simulate users, i. Hi Khawar, You could use most of these tools to create a network that has users with unique IP addresses.

But what if I have one system that emulates the x number of users, obviously with different IP addresses, and one system containing my network or wan and other sections of the experiment? I was wondering I have a named interface with a single IP address attached to it so my network other physical computers will be seeing it as a single user.

Are these software able to work around that as well? CORE will do this. Of the simulators I have reviewed, I think Psimulator2 is the only one that would not work for you. Got the idea. Since you are online, I should put another question as well. Can this setup be used as an overlay to test another protocol that is similar to IPv6 or I would have to port the implementation into the simulator itself and then use that code to interact with IPv6 network. One such scenario might be to test a protocol e.

You need to install the software you will test so it will run on the virtual nodes. See my post about making custom services in CORE. It would be simpler to do this in Cloonix or GNS3 where you could create a disk image that has the software each node will run. But GNS3 and Cloonix use full virtualization so use more resources.

By canvas, you exactly mean an independent physical server with an interface card even though that interface card will be bound to a single ip? I am going to look into CORE, and try to do exactly what you suggested. If you are using physical machines then see my other reply about the physical setup. I suggest you read through the GNS3 posts on this blog.

No coding is required to use GNS3. Hi Brian, Thanks for the useful post. Hi Farid, Any of the simulators I have written about except for Psimulator2 would probably meet your needs, depending on the details of your requirements.

Congratulations for taking the time to create such an amazing content, and to share it with the whole Internet. Hi Hilton, Thanks for reading my blog. But since lower layers tend to be more reliant on specific hardware, I am not sure I will find any that are based on open-source software. My bad, I missed this for so long time. Since Packet Tracer is so similar to a production environment, there's another risk here, too. You can inadvertently develop a habit of "saving and reloading" as a valid troubleshooting methodology, which can carry over into production environments and be impactful to business networks.

No Built-In Labs. When you first download and install Packet Tracer as a new user, you're presented with a blank network topology as a sandbox. For some, a sandbox is seen as an invitation to experiment and learn on their own.

For others, a blank sandbox can be overwhelming. The lack of built-in labs may be intimidating for learners who need more structure to get started with labbing.

Cisco offers a number of excellent lab exercises in Packet Tracer, but they are locked behind Cisco's NetAcad courses, which are offered by educational institutes such as community colleges and IT training schools. These courses are typically offered both online and on-premises to accommodate a variety of learning styles, but the cost of these courses may prohibitive for anyone on a tight budget.

Cisco's Packet Tracer remains the gold standard in virtual network simulators. For free software, it offers a feature-rich sandbox environment for experimenting with a large number of network device types, platforms, and connections. Furthermore, Packet Tracer's simulation of Cisco's IOS software exhibits the closest behavior to actual network devices, and its built-in terminal client is very similar to the real thing.

For budget-conscious learners that find the sandbox environment intimidating, the lack of built-in labs covering common CCENT and CCNA exam topics could be considered a negative.

To alleviate this, the software allows for the creation of custom labs, but the file-based distribution of these labs presents its own challenges. Despite the software's maturity, Packet Tracer has issues with lab-breaking bugs that cause simulated network devices to behave in unexpected ways. While utilizing Packet Tracer to lab exam topics for other Cisco certification exams is possible, Packet Tracer should not be considered a primary tool for doing so.

Boson is an IT training organization well-known for their high-quality Cisco certification exam coursework and challenging practice exams. Another key product of Boson's is NetSim, an application that simulates Cisco network routers and switches. This article evaluates Boson NetSim Licensing Maps to Exams. Boson's licensing model is cumulative just like Cisco certification levels.

Each Boson license maps specifically to a Cisco certification exam, and includes the labs for the preceding exams, too. This licensing model is easy to understand, relatively affordable, and provides a large number of built-in labs for each exam. If you find structure important, this is really convenient.

Lab Quality. While the number of labs you receive depends on the price, every Boson lab is high quality and tailored to a Cisco certification exam.

Each lab comes with detailed instructions regarding what needs to be configured and verified within the related network topology. Furthermore, most labs ask insightful questions about the output of commands observed in the CLI of the networking device, which helps reinforce understanding about what is being configured and why it needs to be configured.

Just like Packet Tracer, each lab is graded for completion and accuracy within the application. However, where Boson NetSim differentiates itself from Packet Tracer is the ability to track completion of labs from within the application.

This feature allows you to view your completed labs, attempted labs, and un-attempted labs at a glance. It is worth noting here that Cisco's NetAcad courseware also offers labs through Packet Tracer exercises as well as hands-on labs with physical equipment.

However, the focus of this article is reviewing the Packet Tracer software itself, not the NetAcad courseware.

Boson's software revolves around purchased lab activities in addition to a sandbox. This is a feature and advantage that NetSim holds over Packet Tracer, which requires your to either get creative or source labs from NetAcad.

Lab Accessibility. All purchased Boson labs are easily accessible from within the application, unlike Packet Tracer. There is no need to download labs through individual files and import them into NetSim — all labs are downloaded, completed, and graded from within the application itself.

This lets you focus your time on labbing exam topics rather than downloading files and setting up the lab. Custom Lab Distribution. If you create a network topology that you'd like to share with the world, you can easily upload the topology to the NetSim Community. Conversely, you can browse other people's uploaded topologies and download them from within the application. As previously mentioned, there is no need to download a separate topology file and import it as is done with Packet Tracer.

Realistic Terminal Features. Copy and paste is very realistic in NetSim. In a real terminal, highlighted text is automatically copied to the system clipboard. You paste with a right-click. NetSim's terminal mimics this function. This realistic feature sets NetSim apart from Packet Tracer, where this is not supported.

By default, terminals are tabbed, so each device's terminal appears within its own tab, unlike Packet Tracer where each terminal gets its own window.

If this is not desired, you may place a tab in its own window by right-clicking the tab and selecting the "Float" option. Alternatively, you can drag the tab outside of the terminal window to accomplish the same task.

In fact, the entire interface of NetSim boasts this UI — just about every window can be docked and undocked with ease so that the interface is customized to suit your preferences. In NetSim, if a network device can be customized through the addition of modules which it calls "Addons" , the software explicitly asks what modules you would like to insert in the device when the device is added to a network topology. Additionally, NetSim calls out the type of interfaces that each module adds. For example, if you want to add an HWIC-2T network module to a device, NetSim explicitly tells you that the addition grants two additional serial interfaces that the device can use.

Finally, once a device has been customized and added to the network topology, a device with the same physical configuration is saved in the "Recent Devices" window.

This modified device can be easily added to the topology by dragging it from the "Recent Devices" window into the network topology. Less clicking than Packet Tracer. In Packet Tracer, you must place a device in your network topology, manually power off the device by clicking on the power switch , drag the desired network module to the desired slot, then manually power on the device by clicking on the power switch.

Furthermore, this process needs to be repeated for each device that needs its physical configuration modified. If you need to test a topology in Packet Tracer with eight routers using serial interfaces, modifying each device results in a lot of clicking.

Lack of Topology Information. The network topology window shows a limited amount of information, especially while a simulated topology is running. For example, you can't see the link state of each connection between network devices, nor do you have any indication that the device is actively transmitting data.

The primary source of feedback for this type of information is the device itself. While this could help prepare you for a role as a remote network administrator where physical access to devices is not possible, the additional feedback in simulation would be particularly helpful for visual learners. Lack of Topology Customization. Unlike most other network simulators and emulators, NetSim does not have a way to add colorized shapes to a network topology.

Aside from network devices and connections, you can only add text-based notes and labels to the topology. This is a fairly minor point, but is important when rehearsing some exam topics, such as multiarea OSPF, where colored shapes illustrating the different areas comes in very useful. Cannot Modify Active Topology. Once a network topology is running, you can't modify it until you stop the topology, which shuts down the simulated network devices.

If you need to add a new network device or a new connection to your network topology, you must stop the entire topology, modify it as needed, then start the topology once more. This Network Simulation tool allows users to create network topologies and imitate those in modern computer networks. Packet Tracer is one of the most famous Networks Simulation software among networking aspirants and beginners.

PUTTY is a completely free and open-source terminal emulator, serial console, and network file transfer application.

SecureCRT presents the capability to create an SSH connection with a dynamic port forwarding configuration that can be used as a SOCKS proxy to reach all machines in a remote network behind the gateway. Microsoft Visio is a diagramming and vector graphics application build by Microsoft. Microsoft Visio is an excellent diagramming application that lets you work visually to build all sorts of diagrams and is industry-leading with over 12 million users.

Visio makes it easier to define network designs, document best practices, visualize the future state of transformative initiatives, and stay on top of operational insights in your company. PRTG is a network monitoring tool that supports you in ensuring that your computer systems are working easily and that there are no interruptions and outages.

All are discrete-event computer network simulators, primarily used in research and teaching. It allows you to develop, test and train SNMP management applications without purchasing and maintaining expensive hardware devices.

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