Lightweight Operating-System support for a scalable and robust virtual network infrastructure

PlanetLab [3] is a platform for planetary-scale services that has been used very successfully by distributed systems researchers. Multiple simultaneous experiments are contained within separate “slices”, which on each machine is implemented as a lightweight, Linux-VServer based VM [4]. Linux-VServer isolates services with respect to the filesystem, memory, CPU and bandwidth. However, it does not provide complete virtualization of the network; rather, all slices on a node share the same IP address and port space.