Wan Connection Emulation

I wanted to do a POC the other day for a company for the Citrix CloudBridge appliances.

I wanted to emulate the satellite connection between the data center and the ships and demonstrate the use of CloudbBridge.

After googling around for a bit I stumbled upon WANem, a linux project that emulates wan connections.

I downloaded a copy and fired up a Hyper-V virtual machine using the iso file. I also made a clone of a windows 7 virtual machine that I already had and created a new virtual switch on Hyper-V.

I also added two legacy network adapters on the WANem virtual machine because it did not recognize the normal ones.

After all virtual machines booted up I had to configure the network settings on all of them. I decided to use the network 10.0.0.0/24 for the data center part and 10.0.1.0/24 for the ship part.

After I configured the network on the wanem machine with the appropriate addresses I was time to configure the windows machines. I assigned the proper IPs and set the default gateway to be the wanem machine.

I was then able to ping from one windows machine to another, but I also had to configure the emulation options.

You can configure the wanem emulation parameters by visiting the page http://[ip_of_the_wanem_machine]/WANem. This is case-sensitive!

You can then select from predefined line types or a more advanced configuration like I did. I configured each interface with the settings the IT guys gave me, bandwith (assymetric), latency and packet loss.

I did all my checks and then added two CloudBridge appliances, one on each side and then configured them.

After I made sure that everything is working fine, I moved from the virtual machines to the physical servers I had in my disposal.

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