Diameter

Appendix AfreeDiameter Tutorial

A.1 Introduction to Virtual Machines

In the real world, Diameter applications are deployed on multiple machines within a single organization or across different organizations and networks. Because such a multi‐machine environment is expensive to set up and challenging to maintain, this book's examples use an environment based on virtual machines.

A virtual machine (VM) is an emulation of a complete computer system with its own operating system and applications. A VM is created using virtualization software that runs on a physical machine. The virtualization software allows for quick and easy configuration of the VM, for example adding a new network interface is just a matter of a few clicks. The interface between the VM (called the guest) and the system running the virtualization software (your computer, the host) is clearly delimited, so there is no problem, for example, for a machine running Microsoft Windows 10 to host a guest that is running Linux and another guest that is running FreeBSD. Using such a VM environment, we can create the network between Diameter peers for our tests, without the need for several physical computers and network equipment. All the examples in the book can run easily on a regular office laptop. However, we recommend that you use a large screen, or several screens, in order to display the multiple VM screens simultaneously.

We have pre‐configured a VM image containing freeDiameter to reduce your work effort, and we will ...