Nesting Containers for Faithful Datacenters Emulations

Datacenters are a critical part of the Internet infrastructure as they guarantee efficient deployment of a wide range of services. Since a considerable amount of datacenter failures is caused by software bugs and configuration errors, the management and testing of these networks is a crucial task. In this field, emulation-based digital twins have proven their effectiveness. To faithfully emulate the typical three layers hierarchy, composed of physical servers, virtual machines, and containers, the support for nested virtualization is a fundamental requirement. Further, the emulation of hyper-scale datacenters needs to leverage on horizontal scaling over a cluster of nodes. Existing container-based proposals do not meet both requirements. On the contrary, existing VM-based proposals meet such requirements, but they need complex configurations and high resource demands. We propose a container-based framework to faithfully emulate datacenters. This is a fundamental building block for designing datacenter digital twins, that would allow testing of real software implementations in a lightweight, scalable, and easily configurable environment.
Part of ISBN 978-1-6654-7716-1QC 20230821