Test your management application with hundreds of Dell iDRACs

Testing your configuration management application or data center
orchestration software for large scalability requires you to setup a
large lab with many servers.

In the case of Dell servers, the Dell iDRAC is a card with out-of-band
control and monitoring of a Dell server. Rather than buying many servers
and hardware, you can simulate the iDRAC and server in MIMIC Web Simulator.

The screenshot below shows the Dell OpenManage Essentials application
managing 100 simulated Dell servers. The simulation allows complete
control to achieve whatever testing or demo scenario you want.

Once simulated in MIMIC, each of these devices are available on
the network as if they are real devices. Your management applications
can access them and have a complete control over their configurations.
You can easily start, stop them and change their parameters at
run time. You can customize the simulation at run-time to introduce
faults.

SNMP Simulators: build vs. buy

Faced with the prospect of simulating large network management
environments, the typical build vs. buy dilemma emerges: should you pay
for a commercial solution, or build one of your own?

There are several free open-source simulators available, promising to tilt
that equation in favor of "build": since a seemingly viable alternative is
already available, you'll just modify what's out there to suit your needs.

This will work out in only the fewest scenarios: the simplest small-scale
simulations.  For most other uses, there are many pitfalls:

1. Meeting the requirements: You have to evaluate the best open-source
for your purposes, and you risk making a sub-optimal choice. You might
pick one, only to find out it does not handle your changing requirements;

2. Developer training: You have to train your developers on the chosen
solution(s), not only from a end-user perspective, but down to the nitty
gritty design, source code and build procedures. You are essentially
investing in something other than your core competency;

3. Quality: Open-source might be high-quality for commodity software
(Linux, OpenOffice), but in highly-specialized areas it usually has few
developers/maintainers, goes out of date, and results in lower-quality
software.

4. Scalability: Designs that work for a small number of simulated entities
usually will not for large numbers due to worse-than-linear behavior of
algorithms. This will usually result in unacceptable performance.

5. Beyond SNMP: Network management applications these days use more
than SNMP to access the managed entities. This requires an integrated
solution that simulates not only the SNMP interface, but also command-line
interfaces (Telnet, SSH), flow-based protocols (NetFlow, sFlow), Web services
(XML, SOAP, REST, etc).

6. Budget for software maintenance: The initial development task is
usually a small part of the total effort. At least one developer has to
continuously maintain and upgrade the software, post messages on some
user groups for getting it built and deployed but also try to get timely
answers for resolving bugs.

 The end result is usually that you'll spend way more effort on the
"build" decision than the cost of the commercial solution would have
been to start with, impacting time-to-market, quality, support, etc.

Many large companies have already chosen to buy instead of spending
effort re-inventing the wheel. Their thinking is that it is better
to spend time and energy behind the companies' core product and services.
Do they know something you don't?

MIMIC SNMP Simulator has been on the market for 20 years. Simulators is all
that Gambit does and has hundreds of man years invested in. The end result
is a mature, high-quality, high-performance simulator that runs at most of
the large networking vendors world-wide. For example, reference customers
are vendors such as Lancope and Xirrus, and end-users such as Pepco and
SITA.

Combined with the other simulators in the MIMIC Simulator Suite you can
have a large realistic environment for development, testing, demo and
training of your network management application.

MIMIC runs on physical servers or the cloud and has been adapted to many
unforeseen uses. For example, Cisco runs MIMIC in combination with Prime
Infrastructure in their on-demand cloud platform dCloud.

Simulate your RelayR IoT environment with MIMIC IoT Simulator

Don't have different types of sensors to test / prototype / deploy your
IoT application on RelayR? Looking to scale without the expense?

Now you can quickly simulate different types of sensors to send MQTT
payload messages at arbitrary rate to your application.  In this
screenshot we quickly setup 4 different sensor types showing dynamic
values changing in the RelayR console.

MIMIC IoT Simulator can simulate unlimited number of sensors of
unlimited variety with unlimited scenarios, all in software. You can go
beyond the requirements so that there will be no surprises after
deployment.

Scale your IBM Bluemix IoT testing with MIMIC MQTT Simulator

Setting up large IoT environments for development, testing and training
is expensive and time-consuming.

Now you can easily scale your IoT environment for testing with
IBM Bluemix with MIMIC MQTT Simulator. MIMIC simulates large
numbers of sensors generating arbitrary MQTT payloads at desired rates
to prototype application policies, test performance under stress, and
develop sales demonstrations and training curricula.

Here we see 10 simulated MQTT sensors connected to Bluemix generating
messages and responding to commands. With MIMIC, what you can do with
10 sensors you can do with 100,000 sensors from one server or virtual
machine on either private or public cloud.

Quickly prototype your subscriber client with MIMIC and a public MQTT broker

The public MQTT brokers at

http://moxd.io/2015/10/public-mqtt-brokers/

allow you quickly to test your MQTT clients.

By using simulated sensors with MIMIC MQTT Simulator, you can
rapidly prototype your MQTT subscriber application to scale your
IoT environment. For example, this screenshot shows 100 simulated
sensors publishing arbitrary payload messages at predefined rate,
and a mosquitto subscriber client displaying them.

At the bottom left, the "10000-ft view" of the MIMICView GUI
allows you to monitor and control thousands of simulated sensors.
In this case we see the icons of 100 active sensors.
The MIMIC Log Window with diagnostic messages at bottom right
displays the traced MQTT activity of one of the sensors.
The Mosquitto subscriber at top right displays the received
JSON-formatted messages on one of the topics. The tcpdump
capture in the middle top shows the packets exchanged between
simulated sensors and broker.

Train your network operators like airline pilots with MIMIC Simulator

When commercial pilots train for disasters it's not with Microsoft Flight
Simulator, but something more like this realistic simulator.

You too can avoid outages like the recent Southwest grounding by training
your network operators to handle unforeseen scenarios with the industry-
leading MIMIC Simulator.

Create network labs that approximate your production network and play
out complex scenarios on demand to implement / test / train network
management policies. Train your IT staff with all the latest devices and
various network environments. That way they are prepared when a disaster
happens and resolve it quickly.

Anatomy of a virtual sales demo appliance for network management

Overview
Traditionally, providing a sales demo for network management software meant setting up a physical environment featuring the desired variety of networking equipment to cover the sales demonstration to the particular target customer.

Furthermore, most sales scenarios required complicated setup, and required travel to the customer site, or trade shows, or time-sharing of central facilities in a sales demo lab or web-site. These limitations made such demos cost prohibitive, resulting in small-scale, static demos that did not materially impact sales conversion.

With the advent of ubiquitous virtual machines (VMs) and network simulation, sales demo labs can be provisioned cost-effectively by implementing virtual demo appliances on either public or private clouds. Bundling the management app and MIMIC Simulator on a VM image, allows the 
sales staff to instantiate as many demo labs as needed at any point in time, and for the sales associate to access the demo environment over the Internet whenever and as long as needed. Realistic self-service sales demonstrations can be provisioned automatically.

Benefits of cloud based sales

Besides the obvious benefits of reduced sales cycle and higher conversion due to targeted demonstration of a variety of features, higher customer satisfaction and more customer loyalty (thus, repeat business), here are some additional advantages of appliance-based sales:

    Multiple on-demand demo and training sessions can be scheduled without
    worrying about conflict or sharing.

    On-demand pre-sales training can be used for application
    evaluation. With a larger variety of scenarios, demos can be
    tailored to the customers needs.

    Many potential customer take a long time to setup the test lab
    and install the application for the evaluation. An online demo can
    get them started on playing with application earlier so they can
    already get familiarized with the features. When the lab gets ready,
    they can directly start on testing the specific needs. This reduces
    the sales cycle significantly.

    Partner training reduces the support cycle and improves closing rate
    by better demonstrating features that specifically solve customer
    requirements

Implementation

MIMIC Simulator is a simulation software suite including SNMP Simulator, WEB Simulator, NetFlow/sFlow Simulator, designed to accurately create virtual environments to interoperate with network management applications. This solution is already deployed in an on-demand cloud offering called Cisco dCloud, with on-demand sales labs for Cisco Prime Infrastructure. 
This offering leverages the SNMP, NetFlow and Cisco IOS simulation features of MIMIC toward high-impact sales demonstrations.

 

Other such sales demo appliances can easily be implemented as an on-demand, single-tenant offering. Similarly to traditional software installations, the network management application is installed in a VM environment along with MIMIC Simulator. The simulator transparently provides 
a scalable, dynamic network environment to be managed by the application. The customer and even the sales associate driving the demo usually do not know what is running behind the scenes.

Many R&D and Quality Assurance departments already test network management applications against MIMIC Simulator. They setup the simulator to provide predictable, repeatable, regressionable scenarios that run the management software through its paces. Those scenarios can be adapted for sales demos.

An extra customization adds a simple demonstration scaffold to provide the sales staff a user-friendly choice of scenarios to demonstrate. Each scenario configures the simulator to create a particular network configuration and traffic patterns to impact the management 
application. For example, a faulty configuration or an attack scenario can be simulated to show  troubleshooting procedures.

Once a snapshot of this VM lab is saved, any number of independent instances can be provisioned for the required demo periods. The cloud framework isolates each of the VM labs from each other, preventing them from affecting each other.

Summary

A combination of MIMIC Simulator and network management application bundled on a virtual machine provides cost-effective, on-demand sales demonstrations tailored to customer needs. 
Deploying this appliance on the public cloud scales the demo resources at incremental and predictable cost, enabling precise cost/benefit analysis when integrated into the sales CRM environment.