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Cisco Nexus 9000v#

Cisco Nexus9000v virtualized router is identified with cisco_n9kv kind in the topology file. It is built using vrnetlab project and essentially is a Qemu VM packaged in a docker container format.

Cisco Nexus 9000v nodes launched with containerlab comes up pre-provisioned with SSH, SNMP, NETCONF, NXAPI and gRPC services enabled.

N9kv Lite

If you have a Nexus 9000v Lightweight variant, you can use the same cisco_n9kv to launch it

By default, Nexus 9kv image with require 10GB memory and 4 CPU. However n9kv-lite VM requires less resources, so you would want to tune the defaults down.

Following is sample for setting up lower memory and CPU for the n9kv-lite:

topology:
  nodes:
    node:
      kind: cisco_n9kv
      env:
        QEMU_MEMORY: 6144 # N9kv-lite requires minimum 6GB memory
        QEMU_SMP: 2 # N9kv-lite requires minimum 2 CPUs

Please refer to 'tuning qemu parameters' section for more details.

Managing Cisco Nexus 9000v nodes#

Note

Containers with Cisco Nexus 9000v inside will take ~5min to fully boot.
You can monitor the progress with docker logs -f <container-name>.

Cisco Nexus 9000v node launched with containerlab can be managed via the following interfaces:

to connect to a bash shell of a running Cisco Nexus 9000v container:

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

to connect to the Cisco Nexus 9000v CLI

ssh admin@<container-name/id>

NETCONF server is running over port 830

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

gRPC server is running over port 50051

Credentials#

Default user credentials: admin:admin

Interface naming#

You can use interfaces names in the topology file like they appear in Cisco Nexus 9000v.

The interface naming convention is: Ethernet1/X (or Et1/X), where X is the port number.

With that naming convention in mind:

  • Ethernet1/1 - first data port available
  • Ethernet1/2 - second data port, and so on...

Note

Data port numbering starts at 1.

The example ports above would be mapped to the following Linux interfaces inside the container running the Cisco Nexus 9000v 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)
  • eth2+ - second and subsequent data interfaces, mapped to the second and subsequent data ports of the VM (rendered as Ethernet1/2 and so on)

When containerlab launches Cisco Nexus 9000v 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 Cisco Nexus 9000v using containerlab's assigned IP.

Data interfaces Ethernet1/1+ need to be configured with IP addressing manually using CLI or other available management interfaces.

Features and options#

Node configuration#

Cisco Nexus 9000v nodes come up with a basic configuration where only admin user and management interfaces such as NETCONF, NXAPI and GRPC provisioned.

Startup configuration#

It is possible to make n9kv 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: cisco_n9kv
      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.