Did you ever start a horde of virtual machines and a complicated vm-only network set-up just to simulate a medium complex network and the interaction of nodes in that network? Well that’s a tiresome, error-prone and labour intensive process. Fear no more, there’s a tool to the rescue.

“Mininet creates a realistic virtual network, running real kernel, switch and application code, on a single machine (VM, cloud or native), in seconds, with a single command:”

“Because you can easily interact with your network using the Mininet CLI (and API), customize it, share it with others, or deploy it on real hardware, Mininet is useful for development, teaching, and research. Mininet is also a great way to develop, share, and experiment with OpenFlow and Software-Defined Networking systems.

Source: http://mininet.github.com/