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Huawei VRP#

Huawei VRP virtualized router is identified with huawei_vrp kind in the topology file. It is built using vrnetlab project and essentially is a Qemu VM packaged in a docker container format.

Huawei VRP currently supports Huawei N40e and CE12800 variants, the same kind value - huawei_vrp - is used for both.

Huawei VRP nodes launched with containerlab comes up pre-provisioned with SSH, NETCONF services enabled.

Managing Huawei VRP nodes#

Note

Containers with Huawei VRP inside will take ~3min to fully boot without a startup config file. And ~5-7 minute if the startup config file is provided, since a node will undergo a reboot.
You can monitor the progress with docker logs -f <container-name>.

Huawei VRP node launched with containerlab can be managed via the following interfaces:

to connect to the Huawei VRP CLI

ssh admin@<container-name/id>

to connect to a bash shell of a running Huawei VRP container:

docker exec -it <container-name/id> bash

NETCONF server is running over port 830

ssh admin@<container-name> -p 830 -s netconf

Credentials#

Default user credentials: admin:admin

Interface naming#

The example ports above would be mapped to the following Linux interfaces inside the container running the Huawei VRP VM:

  • eth0 - management interface connected to the containerlab management network (rendered as GigabitEthernet0/0/0 in the VRP config)
  • eth1 - first data interface, mapped to the first data port of the VM (rendered as Ethernet1/0/0)
  • eth2+ - second and subsequent data interfaces, mapped to the second and subsequent data ports of the VM (rendered as Ethernet1/0/1 and so on)

When containerlab launches Huawei VRP node the management interface of the VM gets assigned 10.0.0.15/24 address from the QEMU DHCP server. This interface is transparently stitched with container's eth0 interface such that users can reach the management plane of the Huawei VRP using containerlab's assigned IP.

Data interfaces Ethernet1/0/0+ need to be configured with IP addressing manually using CLI or other available management interfaces.

Features and options#

Node configuration#

Huawei VRP nodes come up with a basic configuration where only admin user and management interfaces such as SSH and NETCONF provisioned.

Startup configuration#

It is possible to make Huawei VRP nodes boot up with a user-defined startup-config instead of a built-in one. With a startup-config property of the node/kind user sets the path to the config file that will be mounted to a container and used as a startup-config:

topology:
  nodes:
    node:
      kind: huawei_vrp
      startup-config: myconfig.txt

With this knob containerlab is instructed to take a file myconfig.txt from the directory that hosts the topology file, and copy it to the lab directory for that specific node under the /config/startup-config.cfg name. Then the directory that hosts the startup-config dir is mounted to the container. This will result in this config being applied at startup by the node.

Configuration is applied after the node is started, thus it can contain both partial configuration snippets that you desire to add on top of the default config that a node boots up with as well as the full configuration extracted from the VRP.

When startup config is provided the node will undergo a reboot cycle after applying the bootstrap config, thus the startup time will be twice as long as the node boots up without a config.