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The Emulab Manual
2024-01-04 (93db12d)

The Emulab Manual

Eric Eide,
Robert Ricci,
Jacobus (Kobus) Van der Merwe,
Leigh Stoller,
Kirk Webb,
Jon Duerig,
Gary Wong,
Keith Downie,
Mike Hibler,
and David Johnson

Emulab is a network testbed, giving researchers a wide range of environments in which to develop, debug, and evaluate their systems. The name Emulab refers both to a facility and to a software system. The primary Emulab installation is run by the Flux Research Group, part of the School of Computing at the University of Utah. There are also installations of the Emulab software at more than two dozen sites around the world, ranging from testbeds with a handful of nodes up to testbeds with hundreds of nodes. Emulab is widely used by computer science researchers in the fields of networking and distributed systems. It is also designed to support education, and has been used to teach classes in those fields.

Emulab is a public facility, available without charge to most researchers worldwide. If you are unsure if you qualify for use, please see our policies document, or ask us. If you think you qualify, you can apply to start a new project.

    1 Getting Started

      1.1 Next Steps

    2 Emulab Users

      2.1 Register for an Account

        2.1.1 Join an existing project

        2.1.2 Create a new project

        2.1.3 Setting up SSH access

        2.1.4 Setting up X11

    3 Emulab and Repeatable Research

    4 Creating Profiles

      4.1 Creating a profile from an existing one

        4.1.1 Preparation and precautions

        4.1.2 Cloning a Profile

        4.1.3 Copying a Profile

        4.1.4 Creating the Profile

        4.1.5 Updating a profile

      4.2 Creating a profile with a GUI

      4.3 Repository-Based Profiles

        4.3.1 Updating Repository-Based Profiles

        4.3.2 Branches and Tags in Repository-Based Profiles

      4.4 Creating a profile from scratch

      4.5 Sharing Profiles

      4.6 Versioned Profiles

    5 Basic Concepts

      5.1 Profiles

        5.1.1 On-demand Profiles

        5.1.2 Persistent Profiles

      5.2 Experiments

        5.2.1 Extending Experiments

      5.3 Projects

      5.4 Physical Machines

      5.5 Virtual Machines

    6 Transitioning from the “Classic” Interface to the “Portal”

      6.1 New and Improved Features of the Portal Interface

        6.1.1 Profiles

        6.1.2 Web-based Interaction with Nodes

        6.1.3 Disk Images

        6.1.4 Versioning

        6.1.5 Experiment Extensions

        6.1.6 Resource Reservations

      6.2 Classic Features Not Currently Supported in the Portal

      6.3 Converting an Emulab experiment to a Profile

    7 Resource Reservations

      7.1 What Reservations Guarantee

      7.2 How Reservations May Affect You

      7.3 Making a Reservation

      7.4 Using a Reservation

      7.5 Who Shares Access to Reservations

    8 Describing a profile with python and geni-lib

      8.1 A single XEN VM node

      8.2 A single physical host

      8.3 Two XenVM nodes with a link between them

      8.4 Two ARM64 servers in a LAN

      8.5 A VM with a custom size

      8.6 Set a specific IP address on each node

      8.7 Specify an operating system and set install and execute scripts

      8.8 Profiles with user-specified parameters

      8.9 Add storage to a node

      8.10 Debugging geni-lib profile scripts

    9 Virtual Machines

      9.1 Xen VMs

        9.1.1 Controlling CPU and Memory

        9.1.2 Controlling Disk Space

        9.1.3 Setting HVM Mode

        9.1.4 Dedicated and Shared VMs

    10 Storage Mechanisms

      10.1 Overview of Storage Mechanisms

      10.2 Node-Local Storage

        10.2.1 Specifying Storage in a Profile – Local Datasets

        10.2.2 Allocating Storage in a Running Experiment

        10.2.3 Persisting Local Data

      10.3 Image-backed Datasets

      10.4 Remote Datasets

      10.5 NFS Shared Filesystems

      10.6 Storage Type Summary (TL;DR)

      10.7 Example Storage Profiles

        10.7.1 Creating a Node-local Dataset

        10.7.2 Creating an Image-backed Dataset from a Node-local Dataset

        10.7.3 Using and Updating an Image-backed Dataset

        10.7.4 Creating a Remote Dataset

        10.7.5 Using a Remote Dataset on a Single Node

        10.7.6 Using a Remote Dataset on Multiple Nodes via a Shared Filesystem

        10.7.7 Using a Remote Dataset on Multiple Nodes via Clones

    11 Advanced Topics

      11.1 Disk Images

      11.2 RSpecs

      11.3 Public IP Access

        11.3.1 Dynamic Public IP Addresses

      11.4 Markdown

      11.5 Introspection

        11.5.1 Client ID

        11.5.2 Control MAC

        11.5.3 Manifest

        11.5.4 Private key

        11.5.5 Profile parameters

      11.6 User-controlled switches and layer-1 topologies

      11.7 Portal API

    12 Hardware

      12.1 Emulab Cluster

    13 Emulab OpenStack Tutorial

      13.1 Objectives

      13.2 Prerequisites

      14.4 Logging In

      13.4 Building Your Own OpenStack Cloud

      13.5 Exploring Your Experiment

        13.5.1 Experiment Status

        13.5.2 Profile Instructions

        13.5.3 Topology View

        13.5.4 List View

        13.5.5 Manifest View

        13.5.6 Graphs View

        13.5.7 Actions

        13.5.8 Web-based Shell

        13.5.9 Serial Console

      13.6 Bringing up Instances in OpenStack

      13.7 Administering OpenStack

        13.7.1 Log Into The Control Nodes

        13.7.2 Reboot the Compute Node

      13.8 Terminating the Experiment

      13.9 Taking Next Steps

    14 Emulab Chef Tutorial

      14.1 Objectives

      14.2 Motivation

      14.3 Prerequisites

      14.4 Logging In

      14.5 Launching Chef Experiments

      14.6 Exploring Your Experiment

        14.6.1 Experiment Status

        14.6.2 Profile Instructions

        14.6.3 Topology View

        14.6.4 List View

        14.6.5 Manifest View

        14.6.6 Actions

      14.7 Brief Introduction to Chef

      14.8 Logging in to the Chef Web Console

        14.8.1 Web-based Shell

        14.8.2 Chef Web Console

      14.9 Configuring NFS

        14.9.1 Exploring The Structure

      14.10 Apache Web Server and ApacheBench Benchmarking tool

        14.10.1 Understanding the Internals

      14.11 Final Remarks about Chef on Emulab

      14.12 Terminating Your Experiment

      14.13 Future Steps

    15 Getting Help