Dell FTOSv (OS10)#

Dell FTOSv (OS10) virtualized router/switch is identified with dell_ftosv kind in the topology file. It is built using vrnetlab project and essentially is a Qemu VM packaged in a docker container format.

Dell FTOSv nodes launched with containerlab comes up pre-provisioned with SSH and SNMP services enabled.

Managing Dell FTOSv nodes#

Dell FTOS10v node launched with containerlab can be managed via the following interfaces:

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

ssh admin@<container-name/id>

Interface naming#

You can use interface names in the topology file like they appear in Dell FTOSv (OS10).

The interface naming convention is: ethernet1/1/X (or 1/1/X), where X is the port number.

With that naming convention in mind:

• ethernet1/1/1 - first data port available
• ethernet1/1/2 - second data port, and so on...

The example ports above would be mapped to the following Linux interfaces inside the container running the Dell FTOSv (OS10) VM:

• eth0 - management interface connected to the containerlab management network
• eth1 - first data interface, mapped to the first data port of the VM (rendered as ethernet1/1/1)
• eth2+ - second and subsequent data interfaces, mapped to the second and subsequent data ports of the VM (rendered as ethernet1/1/2 and so on)

The number of available data interfaces depends on the platform used under the FTOS10 virtualization .qcow2 disk and the container image built using the vrnetlab project.

When containerlab launches Dell FTOSv 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#

Dell FTOSv nodes come up with a basic configuration where only admin user and management interfaces such as SSH provisioned.

Startup configuration#

It is possible to make vMX 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: dell_ftosv
      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.