A Heuristic for Mapping Virtual Machines and Links in Emulation Testbeds

Distributed system emulators provide a paramount platform for testing of network protocols and distributed applications in clusters and networks of workstations. However, to allow testers to benefit from these systems, it is necessary an efficient and automatic mapping of hundreds, or even thousands, of virtual nodes to physical hosts-and the mapping of the virtual links between guests to physical paths in the physical environment. In this paper we present a heuristic to map both virtual machines to hosts and virtual links between virtual machines to paths in the real system. We define the problem we are addressing, present the solution for it and evaluate it in different usage scenarios.