Cloonix Documentation¶
- Version
22-01
- Date
Jan 09, 2022
This is the documentation for the cloonix open source hosted at
Cloonix is a tool that helps in the creation of emulated networks made with virtual machines and emulated connections.
Its first goal is an easy and visual use of complex open sources such as qemu-kvm and openvswitch through visual items that will be called guitems throughout this doc.
Its second goal is to have people share network demonstrations based on cloonix, small scripts based on cloonix commands can be shared to display and reproduce complex network scenarios .
In a few words, cloonix is a AGPLv3 set of C software elements working together aiming at the coherent usage of multiple well known open source softwares, the main ones being: qemu-kvm, openvswitch, dpdk, spice, wireshark and openssh.
Cloonix manages clusters of virtual machines, the server is controled by clients that act at a distance or on the same host. All cloonix clients are named cloonix_xxx xxx can be one of the following: gui, cli, ssh, scp, dta, ice, mon, osh, ocp, ovs, xwy.
The cloonix server is launched on the server and is named cloonix_net, it creates and controls guitems that run on the server and are pictured on the gui canvas launched with cloonix_gui.
The main guitem is the kvm virtual machine, around this guitem there are 6 other: lan, nat, tap, phy, d2d, a2b, those guitems are described within this documentation.
The kvm virtual machines can be connected by cloonix commands, the emulated connections between virtual machines are based on openvswitch and dpdk and pictured by the lan guitem.
Emulated desktops for the virtual machines are provided through spice launched with a right-click when above the kvm on the gui.
A double-click on a virtual machine interface (small circle bordering the vm) opens a wireshark spy that displays the packets running through this interface.
You can grab a single file html of this doc to print it:
The cloonix source to compile and install is on github or clownix.net:
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/clownix/cloonix.git
wget http://clownix.net/downloads/cloonix-22-01/cloonix-22-01.tar.gz
All cloonix compiled open sources softwares are installed with cloonix software at /usr/local/bin/cloonix and can be removed with a simple rm.
These necessary softwares are associated to a cloonix version, download it:
wget http://clownix.net/downloads/cloonix-22-01/targz_store.tar.gz
The virtual machines have file-systems that are .qcow2 files, you can download qcow2 guest virtual machines here:
The containers have file-systems that are .img files, you can download guest containers here: