Cisco Nexus 9000v#
Cisco Nexus9000v virtualized router is identified with vr-n9kv
or vr-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.
vr-n9kv nodes launched with containerlab comes up pre-provisioned with SSH, SNMP, NETCONF, NXAPI and gRPC services enabled.
Managing vr-n9kv nodes#
Note
Containers with Nexus 9000v inside will take ~8-10min 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:
Info
Default user credentials: admin:admin
Interfaces mapping#
vr-n9kv container can have up to 128 interfaces and uses the following mapping rules:
eth0
- management interface connected to the containerlab management networketh1
- first data interface, mapped to first data port of Nexus 9000v line cardeth2+
- second and subsequent data interface
When containerlab launches vr-n9kv 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-n9kv 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:
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.