Welcome to another training session for the Packast Storm 400e Network Emulator. In this session, we’ll discuss the routing modes and three advanced features of the network emulator.
At the bottom right corner, you’ll see the three different routing modes:
- Bridging Mode: The easiest to use, it works with broadcast packets. However, broadcast packets may not be desirable in some network emulations.
- Interface Mapping Mode: This is the most widely used. By default, packets move between specific ports, such as A to B and B to A. However, this mode allows complete flexibility in assigning ports, enabling scenarios like directing packets from A to D, C to D, or even all packets to a single port like D.
- Routing Mode: Here, IP addresses are assigned to physical emulator ports under the configuration menu. This mode requires setting up addresses, gateways, and ensuring adjacent devices are on the same subnet. It allows other network devices to point to the emulator as it has an IP address.
Next, we’ll discuss three advanced features:
1. Toggle Icon
The toggle icon enables dynamic emulation, where impairment values and types change over time, either by packet count or time.
- It has five paths, but you can use any combination of them. For example, only paths 1 and 3 may be active.
- You can set delays or other impairment values for each path.
- Toggles can be triggered by timers or packet counts, and icons with the same name remain logically connected across configurations.
2. Traffic Conditioning (Traffic Icon)
The traffic icon allows for advanced traffic conditioning using network queues.
- There are nine different network queues, each with adjustable parameters.
- You can name and associate multiple locations in a network configuration to share a traffic icon, enabling scenarios like remote offices with different cloud characteristics sharing a single internet access pipe to a data center.
- For example, a FIFO queue can limit traffic to 100 Mbps, acting as a throttle with more advanced features.
3. Packet Tap
The packet tap feature collects statistics on packet flow.
- Place start and stop icons anywhere in the configuration to count packets and calculate statistics between those points.
- This tool helps analyze traffic at specific points in your network.
In this session, we covered routing modes, toggle icons, traffic conditioning, and packet taps. Thank you for joining this training session.
