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Network Testing and Emulation Solutions

LANforge Competitive Analysis



LANforge Suite Overview

All LANforge products can be remotely managed and can have multiple users connected at once. LANforge supports a Java GUI application that runs on multiple platforms, including Windows and Linux, and a command line interface (TELNET) that can be accessed from any networked machine. Advanced scripting of LANforge is enabled by perl libraries that connect over the CLI. LANforge is lightly integrated with the superb Wireshark protocol analyzer and packet capture tool. LANforge hardware systems are based on the Fedora Core Linux operating system.

LANforge supports most features on Microsoft Windows platforms, including the LANforge-ICE WAN emulator and SIP VoIP call generation, but LANforge on Linux supports more features, is more powerful and more precise.

See the LANforge FIRE Traffic Generator and LANforge ICE Network Emulator datasheets for more detailed feature sets.


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www.candelatech.com | sales@candelatech.com | +1 360 380 1618


LANforge-ICE

LANforge-ICE is able to emulate networks of various latency, throughput, and packet degradation. It is targeted as a full-range product that can emulate networks up to speeds of 5Gbps. The feature highlights include being able to set the throughput, latency, jitter, packet loss, packet duplication, and packet reordering characteristics. LANforge-ICE can also apply these characteristics to particular packet flows using the WanPath feature. LANforge-FIRE and LANforge-ICE can be used as a single integrated product and can run on the same machine at the same time. It is easy to add new machines to a LANforge system allowing it to scale to meet your growing needs!

LANforge-ICE:

One competitor in this class is Shunra's VE SMB Edition (formerly Shunra\Cloud).

Shunra VE SMB Edition:

There are several open-source network simulators and emulators.

x-kernel
Appears to be an older project that was designed to test protocol development in a pure simulated environment. It does not appear that you can run general purpose network traffic through this system.

nistnet
This is another older project that seems mostly abandoned (development appears to have stopped around 2005). It was originally designed to act as a kernel module and supported routed-mode. It did not appear to be able to act as a bridge.

netem
If open-source, community support and command-line tools are what you are looking for, netem is probably the best choice. It is actively developed and appears to work well in routed mode. It is supported on most recent Linux distributions. It may be functional in bridge mode too, but the documentation is a bit sparse on how that might be configured.

dummynet
Another open-source, comunity-supported and command-line driven emulator is Dummynet. It appears to have most of the standard emulation features and is actively developed. It was originally developed for the BSD platform, and now supports Linux and Windows as well.

Candela Technologies, Inc., 2417 Main Street, Suite 201, P.O. Box 3285, Ferndale, WA 98248, USA
www.candelatech.com | sales@candelatech.com | +1 360 380 1618


LANforge-FIRE

LANforge-FIRE is a stateful network traffic generator that supports multiple protocols including Ethernet, 802.1q VLAN, PPPoE, UDP, TCP, IPv6, HTTP, HTTPS (SSL), FTP, TELNET, SCP, SIP, RTP, NFS, SMB (Samba), iSCSI and others. It supports 802.1Q VLANs, and can also emulate more than 2000 Ethernet interfaces with unique MAC and IP addresses, allowing a single LANforge machine to appear as an entire subnet of machines. It can run all of it's supported protocols at the same time allowing one to generate very realistic network traffic patterns. LANforge-FIRE can support 30,000+ concurrent TCP connections and a mix of other connection types. LANforge-FIRE runs on the Linux and Microsoft Windows operating system, and uses the standard protocol stacks. This ensures standards compliance as well as very realistic traffic generation, including all the subtle latencies and burstiness that a hardware-based solution like SmartBits may not generate. LANforge-FIRE can generate up to 10Gbps UDP traffic rates, and slower speeds for other traffic patterns. LANforge-FIRE supports at least 20 physical interfaces on a single machine, but can emulate many more. Multiple machines can be aggregated together to generate higher traffic loads, and the LANforge software will manage the entire realm as a single entity.

LANforge can calculate various statistics including throughput, latency, jitter, packet-loss, packet corruption, and Ethernet level errors. The Java GUI provides real-time graphical and tabular representation of these reports, and the raw numbers can be saved to disk for post-processing with your spread-sheet of choice (or custom scripts as desired).

One competitor in this class is Ixia's IxChariot, which is similar to LANforge in many ways. Both support a wide variety of real-world protocols and both provide scripting (TCL for IxChariot, Perl/TELNET for LANforge) for advanced traffic generation scenarios.

Ixia's IxChariot:

Agilent's N2X:

LANforge-FIRE:


Candela  Technologies, 2417 Main Street, Suite 201, Ferndale, WA 98248, USA
www.candelatech.com | sales@candelatech.com | +1.360.380.1618
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