Keysight IXIA-C and Nokia SR Linux

Description#

This lab consists of a Keysight ixia-c-one node with 2 ports connected to 2 ports on a Nokia SR Linux node via two point-to-point ethernet links. Both nodes are also connected with their management interfaces to the containerlab docker network.

Keysight ixia-c-one is a single-container distribution of ixia-c, which in turn is Keysight's reference implementation of Open Traffic Generator API. This example will demonstrate how test case designers can leverage Go SDK client gosnappi to configure ixia-c traffic generator and execute a test verifying IPv4 forwarding.

Use cases#

This lab allows users to validate an IPv4 traffic forwarding scenario between Keysight ixia-c-one and Nokia SR Linux.

IPv4 Traffic forwarding#

This lab demonstrates a simple IPv4 traffic forwarding scenario where

• One Keysight ixia-c-one port acts as a transmit port (IP 1.1.1.1) and the other as receive port (IP 2.2.2.2)
• Nokia SR Linux is configured to forward the traffic destined for 20.20.20.0/24 to 2.2.2.2 using static route configuration in the default network instance

Configuration#

Once the lab is deployed with containerlab, users need to configure the lab nodes to forward and receive traffic.

When a lab boots up, containerlab will also execute a command on SR Linux node to fetch MAC address of its e1-1 interface which is connected to tx port of ixia-c-one. Write down this MAC address⁴ as it will serve as an argument in the test script we will run afterwards.

# partial output of `containerlab deploy` cmd that lists fetched MAC address
INFO[0019] Executed command 'bash -c "ip l show e1-1 | grep -o -E '([[:xdigit:]]{1,2}:){5}[[:xdigit:]]{1,2}' | head -1"' on clab-ixiac01-srl. stdout:
1a:b0:01:ff:00:01 

Execution#

The test case is written in Go language hence Go >= 1.17 needs to be installed first.

Once installed, change into the lab directory:

cd /etc/containerlab/lab-examples/ixiac01

Run the test with MAC address obtained in previous step:

go run ipv4_forwarding.go -dstMac="<MAC address>"

The test is configured to send 100 IPv4 packets with a rate 10pps from 10.10.10.1 to 10.20.20.x, where x is changed from 1 to 5. Once 100 packets are sent, the test script checks that we received all the sent packets.

During the test run you will see flow metrics reported each second with the current flow data such as:

2022/04/12 16:28:10 Metrics Response:
choice: flow_metrics
flow_metrics:
- bytes_rx: "44032"
  bytes_tx: "0"
  frames_rx: "86"
  frames_rx_rate: 10
  frames_tx: "86"
  frames_tx_rate: 9
  name: p1.v4.p2
  transmit: started

Verification#

The test that we ran above will continuously keep checking flow metrics to ensure packet count received on rx port of ixia-c-one are as expected. If the condition is not met in 10 seconds, the test will timeout, hence indicating failure.

Upon success, last flow metrics output will indicate the latest status with transmit set to stopped.

2022/04/12 16:28:11 Metrics Response:
choice: flow_metrics
flow_metrics:
- bytes_rx: "51200"
  bytes_tx: "0"
  frames_rx: "100"
  frames_rx_rate: 9
  frames_tx: "100"
  frames_tx_rate: 10
  name: p1.v4.p2
  transmit: stopped