KENG Test Drive

Keysight Elastic Network Generator is a key component of a new end-to-end network test platform based on open standards that enables testing and validation of network products, network designs, and network configurations in an emulated replica of a data center network. This new open platform provides a virtualized digital twin and containerized test tools to accelerate network validation without the need to utilize real network hardware for replicating physical network topologies in a lab.

In this test drive, you can explore the power of Keysight test tools to validate modern data center networks in a software world. This test drive includes both the free version 'Ixia-c' and the commercial version 'KENG.' This lab introduces the concept of Network Topology Emulation through the Container Lab software. In this test drive, you can run four labs: two using the Ixia-c tool and two using Keysight Elastic Network Generator (KENG).

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Keysight Elastic Network Generator is a modern test tool with a brand-new architecture based on containers / micro-services / open-source interfaces and can be deployed inside a multitude of software environments. Thanks to its modular design which includes few mandatory elements and several optional elements, those environments can range from a small-scale device test running on a laptop to a large scale complex network validation running in any private or public cloud.

The basic environment required to operate the tool consists of a Linux Host running Container Engine software. The traffic generated by the tool can be sent directly over the Linux Host Ethernet interfaces or it can be directed towards various overlay networks. However, many of these network connections cannot forward all routing protocol frames and they prevent the correct execution of the test scripts. What is needed is a direct virtual link between all containers involved in the test which can transport any frame generated by the containerized network devices.

Most of the vanilla container orchestration tools do not have sufficient capabilities to create such a direct link. Therefore, various solutions for large scale Network Emulation in a containerized environment have been designed. These solutions oversee orchestrating the test tool containers along with the network device containers, creating virtual links between these elements as required by the network topology, and isolating the whole test environment from other similar test environments. Examples of such Network Emulation solutions include Container Lab or Kubernetes Network Emulation and Keysight Elastic Network Generator is seamlessly integrated with both these ecosystems.