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Dell Enterprise SONiC#

Dell Enterprise SONiC VM is identified with dell_sonic kind in the topology file. It is built using vrnetlab project and essentially is a Qemu VM packaged in a docker container format.

Managing Dell SONiC nodes#

Dell SONiC node launched with containerlab can be managed via the following interfaces:

Note

  1. Dell SONiC node will take ~2min to fully boot.
    You can monitor the progress with docker logs -f <container-name>.

  2. Default credentials are admin:admin

To open a linux shell simply type in

ssh <node-name>

You will enter the bash shell of the VM:

❯ ssh <node name>
Debian GNU/Linux 10
admin@clab-dell_sonic-ds's password: 
Linux ds 5.10.0-21-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.162-1 (2023-01-21) x86_64
You are on
  ____   ___  _   _ _  ____
 / ___| / _ \| \ | (_)/ ___|
 \___ \| | | |  \| | | |
  ___) | |_| | |\  | | |___
 |____/ \___/|_| \_|_|\____|

-- Software for Open Networking in the Cloud --

Unauthorized access and/or use are prohibited.
All access and/or use are subject to monitoring.

Help:    http://azure.github.io/SONiC/
admin@sonic:~$

From within the Linux shell users can perform system configuration using linux utilities, or connect to the SONiC CLI using vtysh command.

admin@sonic:~$ vtysh

Hello, this is FRRouting (version 8.2.2).
Copyright 1996-2005 Kunihiro Ishiguro, et al.

sonic#

to connect to sonic-vm CLI via telnet

telnet <container-name/id> 5000

Interfaces mapping#

Dell SONiC container uses the following mapping rules for its interfaces:

  • eth0 - management interface connected to the containerlab management network
  • eth1, eth2, ... - data interfaces, attached to the VM in order. The first one is mapped to Ethernet0.

The SONiC port name of each later data interface depends on the image's HwSKU. SONiC maps the VM NIC ethN to lanes in the HwSKU's lanemap.ini, and those lanes to an EthernetX port in port_config.ini. With the default HwSKU of the 4.1 and 4.6 images (DellEMC-S5248f-P-25G-DPB, one lane per 25G port), eth2 is Ethernet1, eth3 is Ethernet2, and so on. With a 4-lane HwSKU, ports go up by 4 (eth2 is Ethernet4). To see the mapping for your image, run show interfaces status and read /usr/share/sonic/device/<platform>/<hwsku>/lanemap.ini in the node.

When containerlab launches a Dell SONiC node, it assigns IPv4/6 addresses to the eth0 interface. Data interfaces need to be configured with IP addressing manually.

Features and options#

Startup configuration#

VM-based Dell SONiC supports the startup-config feature. The startup configuration must be provided in a form of a json file extracted from the VM's /etc/sonic/config_db.json path. Consequently, the startup config must be provided in full, partial configuration is not supported.

When the startup config is provided, the default containerlab config is overridden and the startup config is used instead. The user-provided startup config file is copied over to the VM's /etc/sonic/config_db.json path and sudo config load -y command is executed to apply it.

Saving configuration#

Extracting the config from a running node is possible with the containerlab save command. The config will be available in the lab directory under the node's subdirectory.