SmartX Box: Virtualized Hyper-Converged Resources for Building an Affordable Playground

In this paper, we present our proposals and efforts for building an affordable playground (i.e., miniaturized testbed) for Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-Cloud experiments by using hyper-converged SmartX Boxes that are distributed across multiple sites. Each SmartX Box consists of several virtualized functions that are categorized into SDN and cloud functions. Multiple SmartX Boxes are deployed and inter-connected through SDN to build multi-site distributed cloud playground resources. The resulting deployment integrates both cloud multi-tenancy and SDN-based slicing, which allow developers to run experiments and operators to monitor resources in a distributed SDN-cloud playground. It also describes how the hyper-converged SmartX Box can increase the affordability of the playground deployment. Thus, the analysis result shows the efficiency of SmartX Box for building a distributed playground by providing semi-automated DevOps-style resource provisioning.