Component communication over ethernet using VDE switches

[Kevin Burton]

Hello,

I am currently writing a program which boils down to a few components 
communicating over Ethernet using sockets. This works well utilizing the 
nic_router functionality, but I would like to emulate a more realistic 
scenario with the components being started from their own respective run 
scripts.

I know for a fact that this was possible using the VDE switch 
functionality of QEMU in late 2015, but can't get it to work now the 
same way it used to, which simply consisted of starting the switch in a 
terminal and appending

-net vde,sock=<switch location>

to the QEMU args. No errors or warnings are thrown.

Does anybody have recent experience with VDE switches or knows anything 
similar that could be used to achieve a more lifelike scenario? If 
possible, examples of such run scripts would be very helpful.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Kind regards,

Kevin Burton