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Cisco CSR1000v#

Cisco CSR1000v virtualized router is identified with vr-csr or vr-cisco_csr1000v kind in the topology file. It is built using vrnetlab project and essentially is a Qemu VM packaged in a docker container format.

vr-csr nodes launched with containerlab comes up pre-provisioned with SSH, SNMP, NETCONF and gNMI services enabled.

Managing vr-csr nodes#

Note

Containers with CSR1000v inside will take ~6min to fully boot.
You can monitor the progress with docker logs -f <container-name>.

Cisco CSR1000v node launched with containerlab can be managed via the following interfaces:

to connect to a bash shell of a running vr-csr container: 

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

to connect to the CSR1000v CLI 

ssh admin@<container-name/id>

NETCONF server is running over port 830 

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

Info

Default user credentials: admin:admin

Interfaces mapping#

vr-csr container can have up to 144 interfaces and uses the following mapping rules:

  • eth0 - management interface connected to the containerlab management network
  • eth1 - first data interface, mapped to first data port of CSR1000v line card
  • eth2+ - second and subsequent data interface

When containerlab launches vr-csr node, it will assign IPv4/6 address to the eth0 interface. These addresses can be used to reach management plane of the router.

Data interfaces eth1+ needs to be configured with IP addressing manually using CLI/management protocols.

Features and options#

Node configuration#

vr-csr nodes come up with a basic configuration where only admin user and management interfaces such as NETCONF provisioned.

Startup configuration#

It is possible to make CSR1000V 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: vr-csr
      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 partial configuration snippets that you desire to add on top of the default config that a node boots up with.