Every Network engineer would have used Ixia or Spirent for traffic generation. These are generally expensive. For majority of use cases, we need a simple protocol packet generator which can generate packet streams of various protocol types. The recent trend is to move traffic generation application into a VM formfactor. This is more suitable for virtual appliance testing. I recently came across this tool called “Ostinato” from Google and I found it very useful. Even Ixia and Spirent have their traffic generators in VM form factor. I will cover my Ostinato experiences in this blog.
Installing Ostinato:
I installed Ostinato in my Ubuntu 14.04 and 12.04 VM. For Ubuntu 14.04, Ostinato can be installed by:
sudo apt-get install ostinato
The above installs 0.5.1 version. To install later versions(0.6) or to install Ostinato in older Linux versions, use the procedure here.
Starting Ostinato:
Ostinato has a client, server model where servers can be run on multiple hosts and the client can connect to multiple servers. This allows a single client to manage ports present in multiple servers.
To start both client and server:
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