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Merry Christmas and happy automated New Year!

Anton Karneliuk

Hello my friend,

First of I wish you a lot of success and joy in the upcoming 2018 year. May all your dreams come true and all the best to you, your friends and your family. As it’s time to gift presents, I have prepared something for you.



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Christmas present

You remember, we always start articles with explanation of the topology, both physical and logical. We provide initial configuration files, so that you can copy them to your router and start working. By the way, here is the physical topology, for which I’ve created Ansbile playbooks:

But instead of VLAN 2 I use VLAN 999

To simplify this task, I’ve developed a set of Ansible playbooks, so that we let our PC do all the work himself. Well, almost himself.

You remember, we have discussed how to create basic and more advanced Ansible scripts.

Here is my present gift to you: 100_happy_new_year_ansible

Some preparations

Just make sure that in Linux system (or whatever host system, where you have Ansible installed) you have prover hosts files for Ansible and in general:



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$ cat /etc/ansible/hosts

[linux]

localhost



[nokia]

SR1

SR2



[cisco]

XR3

XR4



$ cat /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1     localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4

::1           localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6

192.168.1.101 SR1

192.168.1.102 SR2

192.168.1.111 XR3

192.168.1.112 XR4

This IP addresses must be already configured on your routers. For Nokia (Alcatel-Lucent) SR OS they are configured in BOF and are predefined in my case. For Cisco IOS XRv you need to create very basic config:



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RP/0/0/CPU0:ios#show run

Wed Nov 29 02:21:23.701 UTC

Building configuration...

!! IOS XR Configuration 6.1.2

!! Last configuration change at Wed Nov 29 02:21:14 2017 by cisco

!

interface GigabitEthernet0/0/0/0.999

ipv4 address 192.168.1.111 255.255.255.0

encapsulation dot1q 999

logging events link-status

!

ssh server v2

ssh server vrf default

end

For XR4 you just change IPv4 address to 192.168.1.112 as it’s shown in hosts before.

Probably you will use Management Interface then you can configure it there.

How to use present gift?

To be honest, we have discussed all the topics related to creation of parametrized playbooks roughly a year ago. So I won’t explain details how to create it and its code. I’ll explain just what it does.

There are three 3 main Ansible playbooks:

There are also two folders:

First of all you start “default_lab_linux.yml”. It performs the following sequence of actions:

Just after a couple of minutes needed for Nokia VSRs to boot you launch playbook “default_lab_nokia.yml”, which makes the following things happen:

The last (but not least) playbook “default_lab_cisco.yml” is related to Cisco IOS XRv routers and it does the same actions as the previous one:

Cisco IOS XRv are running in VMWare VMs, so they aren’t launched automatically. You have to start them manually (and configure code from preparation part). If you run them in KVM, you can also automate their launch based on Nokia VSR example

At the end of the plays, you get full meshed network with two Nokia (Alcatel-Lucent) VSRs, two Cisco IOS XRv and six linux bridges to provide this connectivity (and possibility to monitor these links with Wireshark):

Lessons learned

Automation is a key, especially when we step into NFV/SDN era.

Conclusion

Happy labbing and happy New Year!

P.S.

If you have further questions or you need help with your networks, I’m happy to assist you, just send me message.

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BR,

Anton Karneliuk

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