MIMIC Simulator: Simulated heterogeneous network

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.

In that case, an SNMP Simulator like MIMIC Simulator allows you to record

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