Mininet vs TRex
Mininet
mininet.orgTRex
trex-tgn.cisco.comSide by side
| Figure | Mininet | TRex |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Network Testing Software | 8.6 (#4) | 7.9 (#15) |
| Deployment | Mininet networks can connect to real networks, and code developed in Mininet can move to real systems with minimal changes. | TRex is a Linux application; the documentation also describes running it in Docker or a VirtualBox virtual machine for experimentation. |
| Support | The project directs users to its FAQ, documentation, and mininet-discuss mailing list for support and discussion. | The documentation lists a TRex community forum and Cisco DevNet community as support resources. |
| Use cases | Mininet supports research, development, learning, prototyping, testing, and debugging. | The FAQ lists high scale benchmarks, switch testing, large client and server scale tests, production tests, and routing protocol tests as common use cases. |
Plans
In their own words
Mininet
Mininet is a free network emulator that creates virtual hosts, switches, controllers and links on one machine. Its hosts run standard Linux network software on the real Linux kernel and network stack, while switches support OpenFlow. The project describes uses including research, development, learning, prototyping, testing and debugging, including experiments with SDN systems using OpenFlow and P4. A topology-aware and OpenFlow-aware command-line interface supports debugging and network-wide tests. Users can select parameterized topologies or create custom ones, and an extensible Python API supports network creation and experimentation. Mininet networks can connect to real networks, and code developed in Mininet can move to real systems with minimal changes. Installation options include a pre-packaged virtual machine, native installation from source and packages for recent Ubuntu or Debian 11 and later; Fedora support is experimental. Mininet depends on the Linux kernel, while its VM can run through VMware or VirtualBox on Mac, Windows and Linux. Its networks are constrained by a single server's CPU and bandwidth, and it cannot currently run non-Linux-compatible OpenFlow switches or applications. Mininet is released under a permissive BSD open source license.
TRex
TRex is an open source traffic generator for benchmarking platforms with realistic network traffic. It produces Layer 3–7 traffic in stateless, stateful, and advanced stateful modes. Stateless mode supports multiple streams, packet-field changes, and per-stream or per-group statistics, latency, and jitter. Advanced stateful mode emulates Layer 7 traffic over scalable TCP and UDP flows. Emulation includes ARP, IPv6, ND, MLD, IGMP, ICMP, DOT1X, DHCPv4, DHCPv6, and DNS. TRex offers Python automation APIs and a console interface; stateless functions can also be used through JSON-RPC. The manual describes it as a Linux application using DPDK and Linux kernel modules, intended for COTS x86 servers. The site says one server can scale up to 200 Gb/sec. It can run in a virtual machine or Docker for low-performance, low-footprint use, but virtual switches can limit throughput and virtual-machine latency results are not accurate. TRex is free, with hardware and NIC requirements. The GUI monitoring application TRexViewer is supported only on Windows.