This new release of our testbed software provides users with full control of experimental PCs instead of being limited to running VMware images:

• Experimental PCs can be rebooted at will
• There is a LiveCD in the experimental PCs, which will take a root password that you specify before rebooting the PC
• Users are now able to replace the operating system installed by default on experimental PCs, and gain full control
• The host operating system for VMware is restored after an experiment.

This facilitates experiments with other virtualization technologies (e.g, Xen), or with operating systems or software that don't interact in the desired manner with VMware. When compared with other testbeds such as Deter, the differences are that:

• You should be able to run anything on ReAssure, that is compatible with the hardware;
• You may try to attack the ReAssure testbed itself;
• Malicious software should have great difficulty escaping the testbed (if not using exp01 and exp02, the computers set aside for updating images);
• Your experiments using VMware images are portable;
• You can take VMware snapshots;

As before, you can still:

• Use complex network topographies for your experiments, with high bandwidth utilization on each (Gbit ethernet)
• Extend reservations or stop experiments at will;
• Use ISO images and VMware appliances;
• Share image files
• Cooperate remotely with other people, and give them access to the PCs in one of your experiments
• Update your images from two of our experimental PCs that allow connections to the outside (exp01 and exp02)

Under the hood changes:

• The switch management now uses a UNIX domain server instead of a script started by cron. This increases the responsiveness of the system, allows checking the state of the switch directly in real time, and allows self-test results to be displayed on the web interface (for administrators).
• The upload mechanism now uses a UNIX domain server instead of a script started by cron. This increases the responsiveness of the system and allows self-test results to be displayed on the web interface (for administrators).
• The power state of the experimental PCs is controlled via IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) on an isolated network

Visit the project home page, the testbed management interface itself, or download the open source software. The ReAssure testbed was developed using an MRI grant from NSF (No. 0420906).