ViNe¶

ViNe is available to FutureGrid users on the foxtrot and sierra clusters, and can be deployed in any cloud on virtual machines (requires overlay network knowledge).

Overview:

ViNe is a project developed at University of Florida that implements routing and other communication mechanisms needed to deploy a user-level virtual network. ViNe is particularly appealing for cloud computing because it allows the establishment of wide-area virtual networks supporting symmetric communication among public and private network resources (even when they are behind firewalls), does not require changes to either the physical network or the OS of machines, and has low virtualization overheads. ViNe can provide communication among FutureGrid and external resources (including those with private IP addresses) without the need to reconfigure the (FutureGrid) physical network infrastructure.

Prerequisites:

In order for a host to participate in ViNe overlays, users need root privilege to adjust operating system routing tables. Currently, users can get root privilege on the virtual machines (VMs) started on FG clouds. ViNe routers are available on foxtrot and sierra, and VMs started through Nimbus can be configured to participate on ViNe overlays.

Setup:

All VMs must be members of ViNe overlays, independently wether they are on public or private networks. In order to enable the ViNe communication, the following command needs to be executed on participating VMs:

wget -P /tmp -N http://www.acis.ufl.edu/vine/enablevine.php
. /tmp/enablevine.sh

Tutorial:

A step-by-step tutorial on connecting VMs to ViNe overlays can be found in the section Vine Overlay.