Combining hardware and simulation for datacenter scaling studies

Datacenter networks are becoming crucial foundations for our information technology based society. However, commercial datacenter infrastructure is often unavailable to researchers for conducting experiments. In this work, we therefore elaborate on the possibility of combining commercial hardware and simulation to illustrate the scalability and performance of datacenter networks. We simulate a Datacenter network and interconnect it with real world traffic generation hardware. Analysis of the introduced packet conversion and virtual queueing delays shows that the conversion efficiency is at the order of a few microseconds, but the virtual queuing may have significant implication on the performance analysis results.