NETinVM: A whole network in a single virtual machine

Have you ever wished you had a full network lab available to you, full with different networks and systems, where you could try out different tools and techniques whenever you wanted? Maybe to learn about some tool, or to teach or demonstrate some tool to others, or to develop and test a new tool?

Well, we have, and that's why we developed NETinVM.

Consider the following network diagram:



The system labeled "VMWARE" (base.example.net) is a VMware virtual system running in the system labeled "REAL COMPUTER". All other computers depicted in the diagram are User Mode Linux virtual systems running inside the VMWARE system (base.example.net).

Here is the beauty of it: all you need to set up and run this whole network environment is just one real computer running VMware Player (or Workstation or Server) and a copy of the image of the VMWARE system (base.example.net). That image is what we call NETinVM and we have made it publicly available. You can download a copy of NETinVM from http://www.netinvm.org, where you will also find documentation and more details about the tool.

In future posts I'll describe some of the features of NETinVM but if you can't wait you are most welcome to go ahead, download and start using it, and, if you are kind enough, let us know what you think of it via e-mail or blog commment.

We hope you find it useful.

David Perez
Carlos Perez