When you want to test your network management application
customizations, nothing beats running against your production network.
But, when you cannot impact your production environment with your
experimentation, you need to run in a lab, with a facsimile of your network.
parts of your network to simulate in your lab. Once everything works in the
lab, you can deploy changes on your production network.
For capacity planning or training, you might need sample networks that
represent features that you currently have not deployed, and are planning
to implement. In that case, a MIMIC SNMP Simulator can simulate the
network you need.
Figure 1 - Auvik
MIMIC
ships with various sample networks, including
this heterogeneous
network which represents a current, multi-vendor, multi-function,
multi-site
environment containing many features to be managed.
The network has two interconnected sites of
25 devices in total, namely,
New York City and London. This network has a variety of devices from
different
vendors. It contains Routers, Switches, Firewalls, Storage devices,
Wireless
Controllers, Wireless Access Points, Phones, Printers and Windows
Servers from
vendors Cisco, Juniper, Fortigate, PaloAlto, Aruba, NetApp, HP,
Avaya and
Microsoft.
In our lab, the topology is mapped by various common NMS applications,
such as
Auvik,
Entuity,
OpenNMS, Spectrum, etc.
Figure 2 - Entuity
New York has 13 devices starting with
Cisco ASR-9000 as Edge
router with
2 Firewalls connected to core router
Cisco ASR-1000 that
connects to the
inside network.
London has 12 devices starting with
Juniper MX960 as
Edge router
with one Firewall connected to core router
Juniper T4000 that
connects to the inside network.
Figure 3 - OpenNMS
This network can be customized with all other advanced MIMIC features,
such as
-
random interface statistics,
-
CPU/memory statistics,
-
SNMP link/down for root cause analysis,
- CBQOS,
-
IPSLA,
-
IOS configuration management
-
NetFlow
-
Topology Wizard
For example, this network was augmented to 1000 agents:
Figure 4 - Augmented network
MIMIC Simulator accelerates testing and training by providing relevant,
customizable, scalable, dynamic, reproducible network scenarios in your
lab.
Figure 5 - OpsRamp
