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Running multiple VMs that each run an ONOS instance is one way of running a multi-instance ONOS deployment. It is however not practical to do on my resource-constrained laptop. Using Linux Containers is a great alternative that achieves the same thing but uses way less CPU and memory.

Environment

I'm using VirtualBox as virtualization environment, but I see no reason why this shouldn't work on VMWare or other hypervisors. First step is to create a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS server edition. I installed 

LXC

In the following, we'll first create a single container that is fully configured, and then clone the original as many times as needed.

Installing LXC is as simple as running

sudo apt-get install lxc

You should run lxc-checkconfig to determine your system properly supports this technology.

 

Next we'll create a new container with a clean Ubuntu install. This command will download all kinds of dependencies so it might take a while to complete.

sudo lxc-create -n onos1 -t ubuntu

 

You can verify the container is now available on your system. Note the container is currently stopped.

sudo lxc-ls --fancy

 

Go ahead and start the container. The -d flag instructs LXC to daemonize the container, so we'll stay in our shell while the container runs in the background.

sudo lxc-start -n onos1 -d

 

Take a look at the output of lxc-ls again: note the container is now started and, if all has gone well, has received an IP address.

 

You can ssh into the container by using the IP address you just saw; ubuntu is the default login and password. You want to do two things: enable passwordless sudo for the ubuntu user, and install Java 8.

Run sudo visudo and add the following line to the end of the file:

ubuntu ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

Installing Java is done as follows:

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common -y
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java -y
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer oracle-java8-set-default -y

 

If you would like your containers to be automatically started on boot, you'll need to add the following line to /var/lib/lxc/NAME/config, where NAME is your container's name. By the way, on my system the /var/lib/lxc directory is only accessible by root.

lxc.start.auto = 1

Check using lxc-ls --fancy to verify your containers are in fact started on boot.

 

ONOS config

This is what my cell looks like. Some things you may want to check if: 

# LXC-based multi ONOS instance & LINC-OE mininet box
export ONOS_NIC=10.0.3.*
I=1
for CONTAINER in $( sudo lxc-ls ); do
 IP=`sudo lxc-ls --fancy -F ipv4 $CONTAINER | tail -1`
 export OC${I}=${IP}
 let I=I+1
done
export OCI=$OC1
export OCN="192.168.56.9"
export ONOS_FEATURES="webconsole,onos-api,onos-core,onos-cli,onos-openflow,onos-app-fwd,onos-app-optical,onos-gui,onos-rest,onos-app-proxyarp"
export ONOS_USER=ubuntu
export ONOS_GROUP=ubuntu

 

I ran into the weird problem that the ONOS instances weren't discovering each other. This process is driven by Hazelcast and relies on IP multicast. It turned out that LXC uses Linux bridge for connectivity among the containers, and the bridge by default does not forward multicast traffic! This is easily solved by checking the Linux bridge documentation; here's an excerpt

IGMP snooping support is not yet included in bridge-utils or iproute2, but it can be easily controlled through sysfs interface. For brN, the settings can be found under /sys/devices/virtual/net/brN/bridge.

multicast_snooping

This option allows the user to disable IGMP snooping completely. It also allows the user to reenable snooping when it has been automatically disabled due to hash collisions. If the collisions have not been resolved however the system will refuse to reenable snooping.

multicast_router

This allows the user to forcibly enable/disable ports as having multicast routers attached. A port with a multicast router will receive all multicast traffic.

The value 0 disables it completely. The default is 1 which lets the system automatically detect the presence of routers (currently this is limited to picking up queries), and 2 means that the ports will always receive all multicast traffic.

Note: this setting can be enabled/disable on a per-port basis, also through sysfs interface (e.g. if eth0 is some bridge's active port, then you can adjust /sys/...../eth0/brport/multicast_router)

You may want to add this command to your startup scripts so your don't lose these settings when you reboot.

sudo echo 2 > /sys/devices/virtual/net/lxcbr0/bridge/multicast_router

 

Development cycle

 

IP forwarding

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