DETER Recommended Hardware

We have a some recommended hardware for setting up DETER. We will not hand you a shopping list, but here are the things that we use and like:

Network Switches

There are two networks in a typical DETER/Emulab install. The control network is where testbed nodes network boot and mount filesystems over. The experimental network is where experimental topologies are instantiated. Right now, we recommend HP 5400zl series switches. The number of ports depends on how many nodes you want to support. At DETER, we typically have at least five interfaces per testbed node.

​HP 5400zl Series overview

For small installations, we have had good luck with HP 2810 switches.

​HP 2810 overview

Power and Serial Controllers

Historically, we have used real power controllers and serial concentrators rather than IPMI. If your site is on a limited budget, we expect that IPMI could work just as well as these items. We, however, are not using them at DETER yet.

For power controllers, we are using APC 7902 rack PDUs.

​APC 7902 Rack PDU

For serial controllers, we are using Digi Etherlite models.

​DIGI Etherlite network serial concentrators

Infrastructure Machines

There are three main machines in a DETER/Emulab installation. These are boss, users, and router. Boss hosts the database, web interface, and main logic. Users acts as the NFS/SMB server and user login machine. All these machines run FreeBSD 7.4.

These machines do not need to be very high powered if your budget is limited. We have successfully deployed all three machines on a single PowerEdge 860 with 4GB of ram running VMWare ESXi. How much of a box your provision is really up to what your site requirements are.

Testbed nodes

What you provision here is really up to you. All of the machines we are using at DETER are no longer in production, so we can not recommend specific models.

• The machines must be able to PXE boot.
• The machines need to be capable of running FreeBSD 7.4.
• You should ideally have about 5 network interfaces on each node. One interface for the control network and four for the experimental network.

Aside from these basic requirements, the testbed nodes depend on what you intend to do.

Our standard operating system images include Ubuntu 10.04, CentOS 5, and FreeBSD 8.