About Wistar¶
Wistar is a tool to help create and share network topologies of multiple virtual machines. It uses a drag and drop interface to make connecting instances together into large networks super easy. These topologies can then be saved, shared, cloned, or destroyed at will. The idea is to make experimenting with virtual networks and virtual machines as frictionless as possible.
Wistar uses technologies like cloud-init and config-drive where possible to simplify the process of deploying new virtual machines. It can use your existing SSH keys to provision new instances with a known user account. VM’s are modeled as javascript objects which encapsulate all management aspects of that VM type. For example, there is a Linux type that specifies things like the interface naming prefix == “eth”. Another type models a Junos Space image, which gives hints about how much RAM and vCPU is required. Some VMs, such as the Juniper vQFX, require multiple VMs to be ‘wired’ together in a particular way. Wistar encapsulates this information and treats multi-VM instances as a single instance with the correct inter-VM ‘wiring’ in place.
Once a topology is created, Wistar will serialize the canvas into a JSON object and store it in a database. This JSON object can then be serialized to HEAT for deployment to openstack, or pushed directly to KVM via libvirt.
More detailed information can be found here. User specific configuration information can be configured in the wistar/configuration.py file.
Supported Hypervisors / Deployment Backends¶
Saved topologies can be deployed to multiple backends.
- Currently implemented deployment back-ends (in order of maturity):
- KVM
- Openstack
- VirtualBox (deprecated)