I would like to virtualize networking hardware (mainly switches) to test newly developed software/OS features and would need help about the how.
The idea would be to run the firmware on the virtual hardware and test it in the virtual network. But I don't know where to start. Since the switches have CPUs, switching ASICs and are all inter-connected by ports, this seems to be quite complex.I know that simulated virtual behavior is not the same as the physical behaviour, but being able to test whether any bugs are in the OS would be very helpful already.
I found out about OpenvSwitch, KVM, QEMU, ... but couldn't bring the topics together.
Question: How can I virtualize networking hardware in a way that I can run my OS on the virtual switch? And then, how can I run integration tests on the virtual network?