Ravello Launches Networking Labs on AWS

Ravello Systems created Smart Labs for Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), and Google Inc. clouds to test networking and security implementations.
Ravello claims to be an expert in nested Virtualization, which is the process of running unmodified guests on top of virtualized hardware.
The Network Appliance Smart Labs and Security Appliance Smart Labs now offer encapsulated VMware Inc. environments and Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM) environments that can run on the cloud infrastructure for testing, development, training, and demonstration of technology. VMware is a leader in network virtualization. KVMs offer virtualization hypervisors to Linux systems.
According to the company, the labs will leverage the elasticity and Google cloud for additional functionality in physical datacenter labs.
Yesterday, the company stated in a blog post that its goal was to “enable the entire ecosystem of security and networking technologies with real-world labs running in the cloud to achieve an level of scale and accuracy that is not possible with traditional network simulation approaches.”
[Click on the image to see a larger version.] Simulating a Network Threat (source : Ravello Systems). “Using Ravello’s technology, we enable true ‘datacenter-like’ labs in cloud — without any restrictions regarding layer 2 networking or security testing,” said the company. “We imagined a world in which network and security teams would not be limited by their hardware resources when they require a lab to design, model, proof of concept, or even upgrade testing.
Navin Thadani, a company executive, noted that VMware- and KVM based virtual appliances are the most popular virtualization formats of today, but not all implementations will run in the cloud. The HVX nested virtualization method of the company allows such appliances to run on AWS and Google without any modifications. It also has access to the layer 2 plane, which provides advanced technologies like broadcast and multicast, promiscuous mode, span ports and access to the layer 2.
Thadani stated that “our goal is to empower professionals to test, design, and train using real network and security appliances OSes in public cloud.”
Smart Labs uses pay-for-usage pricing, starting at $0.14 per vCPU and 4GB chunks.