Importing Existing switches into CloudVision Portal

posted on January 4, 2016 by

Introduction CloudVision Portal (CVP) abstracts the physical network to support turn-key automation for zero touch provisioning, configuration management and network-wide upgrades and rollback. CVP allows the user to quickly deploy new switches into the network using predefined, user created, configuration snippets called configlets. This functionality allows the user to simply automate the deployment of new network elements. What happens if the network elements are already deployed in the network and the user wishes to introduce CVP to automate configuration updates? How would these switches be brought into CVP and their configurations integrated into the configuration hierarchy? This guide will look...
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CloudVision Portal RESTful API Client

posted on September 25, 2017 by

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....
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CVP APIs: A Non-Programmer’s Guide

posted on August 31, 2017 by

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...
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Configure Linux or Microsoft DHCP Server for ZTP using CloudVision

posted on August 18, 2017 by

Configure Linux or Microsoft DHCP for ZTP using CloudVision   Summary One of the many features CloudVision offers along with Configuration management, image management, Telemetry, and Change Management includes Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) and Zero Touch Replacement (ZTR). Users can either use the preinstalled DHCP server on the CloudVIsion server’s bash or use any other DHCP server like Microsoft Windows.   In this article, we will outline the steps required to get DHCP working on both the Linux and Microsoft platform as well as basic steps to provision a new switch, and replacement. All this can be done without the...
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Demo: CloudVision skill for Amazon Alexa

posted on July 7, 2017 by

Great APIs accelerate development of new applications and integration with existing tools and services. Check out the sample CloudVision skill for Amazon Alexa that the EOS+ Consulting Services team put together one afternoon! Please share and use the comments to tell us about other integrations that you would find interesting and useful!

Using dynamic Ansible inventories to manage CloudVision switches.

posted on June 5, 2017 by

Ansible Dynamic libraries with CloudVision  The common question when talking with customers about CloudVision is are we able to also use a configuration management tool such as Ansible along with CloudVision?  You can use CVP and Ansible to both manage your Arista devices.  This is a guide to dynamically pull CloudVision for its devices and automatically have Ansible use those CVP managed devices.  Arista has supported Ansible EOS modules for quite some time and are still innovating on new modules in the latest version of Ansible which at the time of writing is 2.3.  Summary Dynamic inventories are setup in Ansible...
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CloudVision Automated snapshot using Cloudvision API

posted on March 20, 2017 by

Purpose The purpose of this document is to build an automated task to create container based snapshots using the CloudVision API along with a scheduled cron job from any reachable Unix/Linux/Mac server. This script will come in handy to compare network status/configuration of your entire network by taking snapshot on a predefined schedule and can be modified if an administrator’s requirements change. After we create a snapshot template in CloudVision (by default, CloudVision uses the show_inventory template, but can be customized with the desired set of commands),   we will write a simple Python script that leverages the snapshot template to perform...
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Datacenter Deployment Automated

posted on March 8, 2017 by

Planning Methodology There is a lot of talk about automation in the datacenter which indeed saves time but a lot of effort still goes into planning. After all, failing to plan is planning to fail. I needed a way to start automating some of the planning and repetitive tasks needed for deploying the same blueprint across various sites. One of the bigger tasks is the IP Plan and making sure that the correct IP’s get used in configurations. Additionally making sure that the same methodology gets used on different sites. Initially, I set out to use a very nice utility...
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Using Jinja Templates on CVP

posted on February 17, 2017 by

Why use Jinja? Jinja2 is a user-friendly template engine for Python. It is easy to learn and use, and also fast – as a result, a lot of developers use it these days. It is easy to model since its syntax is quite similar to Python; debugging is easy, in fact quite similar to Python’s debugging capabilities. To install Jinja, download Jinja2 from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Jinja2 and install it in the /cvp/pythonlab/Lib folder. Usage of Jinja2 on CVP In CVP, we have the facility of creating dynamic configlets which can generate device specific configuration. In our example deployment, we will create a...
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CloudVision Deployment Guide using Python API

posted on March 29, 2016 by

Audience This document is intended for those that are familiar with, or have intermediate abilities with python scripting. This script is meant for deployment in a greenfield environment, but can be modified to be used in a brownfield environment as well.  With either deployment scenario it is advisable to contact your SE/TAC for a code review or advice prior to deployment. Purpose The purpose of this document is to build automated configlets to push configurations to a massive ECMP(L3), MLAG(L2) infrastructure using the CVP Python API doc. As the scale of switches increases, the script comes in handy by automating...
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Deploying Arista Switches using CloudVision Portal

posted on February 23, 2016 by

Deploying Arista switches using CloudVision Portal (CVP) Introduction CloudVision Portal or CVP is an automation and orchestration tool for management and deployment of switch configuration across an entire IP based data center network. CVP uses a container hierarchy for organizing devices into logical groups and splits the device configurations into ‘configlets’ which can be applied at varying levels of the hierarchy to provide inheritance and de-duplication of effort when developing device configuration. This approach reduces human error thru inheritance of configuration. Operators can focus on the device specific configuration, knowing that general configuration, such as, AAA, domain name and DNS...
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SDN Starter Kit Quick Start Guide v2015.1

posted on December 15, 2015 by

Introduction The Quick Start Guide is intended to provide an introduction to Arista Networks switches, Extensible Operating System (EOS) and recently released CloudVision management. It is intended to help the reader quickly deploy Arista switches and leverage the power of automation by using CloudVision. The setup, installation and configuration from start to finish should not take more than a couple hours.  Audience This guide is intended for the following audience:  • End user getting familiar with CloudVision • End user getting familiar with Arista’s EOS CLI CloudVision – Network Automation Key CloudVision features include point and click interface to simplify bulk tasks,...
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