Arista EOS Central - Category

Docker containers on Arista EOS

Posted on January 8, 2018 by Daniel Hertzberg Hertzberg | 8820 Views

Docker on EOS In this article we will talk about what is a container, how it is applicable to Arista EOS switches and pulling containers from a public or private repot to run on a Arista physical or virtual device. A docker container is simply a way to abstract and decouple an application from a linux(and now windows) operating system to run as a process on a host machine with the bare minimum requirements. Docker makes creating cloud portable applications extremely easy. So a application can be written from a mac laptop intended to be ran on a Ubuntu container...
Continue reading →

Using the CloudVision API with Service Accounts

Posted on March 31, 2021 by Jonathan Smith | 782 Views

Description With the release of CloudVision Portal 2020.3, you have the ability to create Service Accounts. I won’t show you how to create a Service Account, but you can go to this TOI to read about that. This article will show you how to use Service Account Tokens in Python and cURL for API calls. Platform Compatibility This applies to both CVaaS and on-premise installations. How To Using a Service Account Token allows you to bypass the standard authentication process when making API calls. It also allows you to create a local “account” on CloudVision that doesn’t depend on outside authentication...
Continue reading →

Curl’ing with EOS and third party devices

Posted on December 30, 2020 by Chris Tassone | 737 Views

Perhaps you’re aware that EOS is based on Linux, which comes with many powerful & useful built-in utilities. I recently wrote an EOS Central article on sed. Even if you are not a pure networking person (perhaps you’re a server person), many of the familiar Linux tools you have used in your past exist on EOS natively today. One of my customers recently shared an experience with me that made me smile because they had now started to embrace the Linux underpinnings & power of EOS after running into a configuration challenge with a 3rd party (television) broadcast IP/SDI gateway...
Continue reading →

A simple GNU sed example on EOS

Posted on December 29, 2020 by Chris Tassone | 639 Views

Hopefully by now you are aware that Arista EOS (Extensible Operating System), which is the operating system that runs on Arista switches, is based on Linux. From the CLI you can drop to the Bash shell by just typing bash. Given that EOS is based on Linux you already have access to many of the helpful utilities seen in many Linux distributions. Let’s pretend that you have a configuration file that was copied over from another very similar configuration and that the only thing that needs to change is every occurrence of IP addresses that look like 10.0.x.y. This is...
Continue reading →

NCClient Example with EOS

Posted on May 19, 2020 by John Allen | 1963 Views

Introduction Ncclient is a python library that provides a set of tools to interact with and manipulate devices supporting NETCONF server functionality. The goal of this article is to assist users to leverage ncclient effectively with EOS. This article will outline the use of ncclient to configure Arista devices using EOS CLI commands, as well as YANG modelled data (and a combination of the two). This article is not intended to be a full tutorial on YANG or EOS supported YANG models. Arista EOS strives to support open YANG models via support of OpenConfig models wherever possible. At times vendor...
Continue reading →

CVP to K8s: full-scale production network simulation

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Michael Kashin | 2099 Views

Intro Network simulation environments have always been limited to a single compute node, which made the labbing of a full-scale production network an exercise in compromise and trade-offs. At the same time compute resources are cheap and abundant and modern application designs are making use of them by adopting meshed scale-out architectures, treating multiple hosts as a single pool of resources. In this post, we’ll see how (with just a few clicks*) we can build a replica of a real production network, orchestrated by Kubernetes based on information extracted from Arista’s CloudVision Portal (CVP). * Assuming all the prerequisites are met

Enabling eAPI on Multiple Devices using Netmiko

Posted on December 21, 2018 by Brandon Greer | 1636 Views

Mass Enabling eAPI with Python Preface In standard Arista deployments, one of the most powerful and common features that will be used is our EOS API (eAPI). It is good practice to enable this on every initial deployment. One of the best ways to do this is via our Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP), but in some cases, ZTP is not an option. When this becomes the case, it can be easy to enable eAPI on all of your devices quickly through the use of the Python programming language and SSH (which is enabled by default on all Arista Switches). Throughout...
Continue reading →

Network CI/CD Part 3 – Building a network CI pipeline with Gitlab, Ansible, cEOS, Robot Framework and Batfish

Posted on October 3, 2018 by Michael Kashin | 12555 Views

Previously on Network CI/CD… We’ve kicked off this series with an overview of cEOS-lab and different container orchestration tools that can be used for network simulations. In the second post we’ve seen how to automate network verification and testing with Arista’s Robot framework library. In this final post, we’ll put it all together to demonstrate a simple data centre network CI pipeline that will run through a sequence of stages to build and test every new configuration change. Introduction Let’s take a typical data centre leaf-spine network as an example and let’s assume that Leaf-1/2 and Spine-1/2 are already built...
Continue reading →

Provisioning Cloud Vision Portal on AWS

Posted on August 21, 2018 by Shalin Shah | 818 Views

Introduction This article demonstrates provisioning CloudVision Portal on AWS. With the release of CVP version 2018.x and upgrade of CVP platform to CentoOS 7.4, Cloud Vision Portal can be installed on CentOs servers with an RPM based script. This article specifically covers provisioning of CVP on the AWS EC2 Cloud platform. With CVP running on AWS users can easily manage AWS/OnPrem EOS instances from AWS and run analysis on CVP Telemetry/Compliance information with other AWS services and tools. Pre-Requisites 1) AWS account with appropriate privileges to create and access EC2 instances, DNS and NTP services. 2) Access to Arista.com Software...
Continue reading →

Network CI/CD Part 2 – Automated Testing with Robot Framework library for Arista devices

Posted on May 21, 2018 by Michael Kashin | 1759 Views

Previously on Network CI/CD Part 1… We’ve established that lack of simulated test environments and automated test tools are among the inhibitors in a transition from a traditional network operation model to a DevOps workflow, where all changes are verified and tested prior to being deployed in production. We’ve seen how to solve the first problem with Arista’s cEOS-Lab docker container and a simple container orchestration tool. We’ve shown how the new containerised EOS allows us to dramatically increase the number of nodes we can deploy on a single host and decrease the total build and boot time compared to VM orchestration methods, e.g. the ones based on...
Continue reading →

Integrating Salt and Arista ZTP Server for Zero Touch Automation of EOS

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Daniel Hertzberg Hertzberg | 677 Views

Zero Touch Provisioning The term ZTP or Zero Touch Provisioning is a feature often heard, which EOS has offered since the early days. During the initial boot, if a startup-configuration file is not found in the /mnt/flash/startup-configuration directory, the EOS device will automatically boot into ZTP mode. The switch will obtain an IP address from a DHCP server including DHCP options 66 and 67. Next the switch will ask the ZTP server or a server designated within option 66/67 for a bootstrap file. In this post we will use the Arista ZTP server which can be found here. This process is depicted in the following picture: The...
Continue reading →

Network CI/CD Part 1 – Building network topologies with Docker and cEOS-lab

Posted on May 4, 2018 by Michael Kashin | 4049 Views

Introduction As the networking industry continues riding the DevOps wave and network engineers become more comfortable using automation tools like Ansible and Salt, network still remains the most brittle piece of IT infrastructure. Partially this can be justified by the fact that network underpins all other areas of IT infrastructure stack – compute, storage and virtualisation. However we, as network engineers, have done very little to improve our confidence in networks and until now some of the biggest outages were caused by trivial network configuration mistakes. When software industry was facing similar challenges, the response was to create Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines –...
Continue reading →

EOS allows you to choose your own hardware and run your own apps

Posted on March 20, 2018 by Ryan Torres | 3671 Views

You’ve decided to go open source with your datacenter network. Whether you want to go open software or open hardware, Arista EOS provides the best software stack to complete your solution. In fact, I’ve been told that most of my daily web usage travels through a switch running EOS along the way. Arista’s EOS software architecture is designed to manage the best network silicon available for datacenters. EOS is offered as a single binary across all Arista products, including 4 silicon architectures, over a dozen chipsets, as well as in hypervisor, container, and cloud-platform packaging. We have always supported the...
Continue reading →

vEOS-Lab on Hyper-V

Posted on January 19, 2018 by Urvish Panchal | 1183 Views

Introduction There are multiple ways to setup a vEOS-Lab environment if you have a linux system or on hypervisors such as VMware ESXi, vCenter, VM Workstation, VM Fusion, Virtualbox, etc using the vmdk provided in the Software downloads page. But if you have a Windows machine or a Windows server, the vmdk will not be useful. So here are the steps on how you can convert the vmdk to a vhdx and create a vEOS VM on Hyper-V. Pre-requisites 1. Hyper-V Manager and Hyper-V 2. vEOS-Lab vmdk 3. Aboot ISO Instructions Steps 1. Download the vEOS vmdk for the EOS version...
Continue reading →

Arista Salt integration

Posted on January 16, 2018 by Daniel Hertzberg Hertzberg | 5630 Views

What is Salt? Salt is an event driven infrastructure management tool. It sounds really complex but it’s not. Salt is similar to most of the configuration tools that we use in our every day lives to configure infrastructure but there are many key differences in the way salt is architected. Salt is very unique as it has a ZeroMQ high speed messaging bus between the salt minions (in our case Arista switches) and a master which is typically a Linux server. Salt can be used to configure devices from multiple different template languages such as Jinja or YAML. Salt can...
Continue reading →

Creating A Multi-node vEOS Vagrant Enviroment

Posted on December 5, 2017 by Ahmad amin | 881 Views

Introduction Beginning with EOS 4.15.2F, vEOS is available as a Vagrant box for VirtualBox. Vagrant is great whether you are simply getting started with vEOS or want to easily create a complex test environment. With Vagrant, multiple VMs may be defined within a single ‘Vagrant file’, including non vEOS VMs allowing for an entire topology to be instantiated using a single file. For more info on Vagrant, check out their documentation. This document will go through the details of how to use the predefined Vagrantfile shared below to instantiate a Spine&Leaf topology with vEOS. The topology that will be created is shown...
Continue reading →

Using eAPI to Provide SNMP Extensions

Posted on November 5, 2017 by Richard | 1052 Views

EOS utilizes net-snmp which offers provisions to extend OIDs. The following script leverages eAPI to gather OSPFv3 interface information and populates the SNMP ospfv3IfTable. The OSPFV3-MIB can be downloaded from here: http://www.oidview.com/mibs/0/OSPFV3-MIB.html #!/usr/bin/python -u # # Arista Networks, Inc. # # Script: ospfv3IfTable.py v1.6 # # This script populates the ospfv3IfTable via a net-snmp extension # # 1. Copy this script to /mnt/flash as ospfv3IfTable.py # # 2. Copy snmp_passpersist to /mnt/flash # https://github.com/nagius/snmp_passpersist # # 3. Enable management api (script uses a unix socket) # management api http-commands # protocol unix-socket # no shutdown # # 4. Configure snmp to...
Continue reading →

Configure groups of interfaces based on description regex

Posted on November 5, 2017 by Richard | 655 Views

A simple python eAPI script to find groups of interfaces to configure based on a regex match to interface descriptions. The most interesting part is that the script types out the “interface <list of matching interfaces>” command in an interactive manner as if the EOS CLI user typed it. The command is even saved in the command history. Give it a try! 1) Configure a command alias: alias intRegex bash sudo /mnt/flash/intRegex.py %1 2) Load the script in flash: #!/usr/bin/env python # # intRegex.py ver 1.12 # Arista Networks, Inc. import jsonrpclib, os, re, socket, sys, fcntl, termios...
Continue reading →

CloudVision Portal RESTful API Client

Posted on September 25, 2017 by Matthew Hartzel Hartzel | 6749 Views

Arista Cloudvision® Portal (CVP) provides a central point of management for Arista network switches through shared snippets of configuration (configlets) enabling Network Engineers to provision the network more consistently and efficiently. While CVP highlights a graphical user interface for configuration and management of devices, it also includes a full-featured RESTful API that provides all of the same functionality available via the GUI which can be used to automate workflows and integrate with other tools. CVPRAC is a wrapper client for CVP’s RESTful APIs which greatly simplifies usage of the API and more elegantly handles the connections to the CVP nodes....
Continue reading →

CVP APIs: A Non-Programmer’s Guide

Posted on August 31, 2017 by Olufemi Komolafe | 2191 Views

1. What are CVP APIs? Most CloudVision Portal (CVP) users are familiar with the web user interface (UI) that facilitates network provisioning, inventory management, tasks management, change control and so on. CVP application programming interfaces (APIs) offer an alternative means of realizing the same functionality. The key difference is that, with the CVP APIs, the functionality is realized over a programmatic interface (i.e typically by a piece of software communicating with another piece of software) rather than by a user navigating over a web page and clicking and/or typing. Figure 1 shows a simplified example of these two methods of...
Continue reading →

Category : DevOps